Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
choose FFMpeg , and expand the Encoding panel directly below it. I'm not even going to make a
screenshot of the panel, because it contains a lot of things you shouldn't be touching at this point. In the
Format control, you can choose from Flash, Xvid, H.264, DV, Quicktime, AVI, and three different flavors
of MPEG. If you're distributing to people on Windows computers, choose AVI. Mac users would appreci-
ate Quicktime. The truth is that most computers can play most video formats these days, regardless of how
things were ten years ago. To be platform agnostic, I've used MPEG-2 for the videos that come along
with this topic. It's the compression standard used by DVD video. If you do choose AVI or Quicktime,
you will also have to choose a codec from the control to its right. My recommendation would be to use
either the H.264 or MPEG-2 codec. Both are widely supported, although H.264 is considered more
“modern” and has better quality with smaller file sizes.
The only other setting you need to worry about is the Bitrate . This controls compression and overall
quality. Higher bitrates give greater quality, but make larger files. In general, a bitrate of around 8000 kb/s
will work out to about 1 MB/s. In the case of the sample file, the actual file is smaller than this, as there's
really not that much going on in the animation. Most of the scene is static. Where to start with this value?
Try the default: 6000. If things look nice, then you're fine. If you notice bad compression artifacts, you'll
need to raise it. If your resulting animation file is too large, you'll need to lower it.
With a video format chosen, set your frame range to match the original and hit the Animation button
in the Render panel. The frames will speed before your eyes, and before you know it you'll have an
animation file. Find the file and play it with the animation player of your choice. Too much compression?
No problem. Adjust your settings in Blender and re-render the animation. No need to go back to the
actual Blender scene—you're just fooling around with the prerendered frames now. It is fast and easy to
make adjustments to the animation settings.
Try this: Make sure that anti-aliasing is enabled in the Render properties and set the Resolution percentage
down to 50%. Render out the animation. The Sequencer creates a half-size animation, sampling down the
provided frames on-the-fly. You don't even have to stick with the same aspect ratio. You could go wacky,
and render your 720p original frames out to a 128 × 300 pixel animation and the Sequencer would happily
do it.
Let's do two things before we leave our little room and character forever. First, we'll add two sounds.
One is a music track. The other is a clattering noise. Press Shift-A over the Sequencer's workspace and
choose Sound . Browse to the file provided in the Web Bucket called clatter.wav (the sound was obtained
from www.freesound.org , which provides Creative Commons licensed sounds). Figure 14.4 shows the new
sound strip, with the original image strip
in place. The goal is to move the sound
strip so that it lines up with the cube
toy hitting the table. It's simple enough
to scrub the frame marker inside the
image strip until you find the frame
where the cube strikes the table. Once
you've found it, use the G key to move Figure 14.4   Adding  a  sound  strip  for  the  cube.
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