Final Edit and Output - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 329

new Scene strips (green). Notice that the old animatic strips and even the story board strips are still in place.
When the Sequence is rendered, neither will appear in the fi nal product, or even cost you any time. However, it is
a good idea to keep them around as a reference if you should mess up or get confused when adding and editing
the Scene strips.

NOTE
Don't go adding all of your shots as new Scenes just yet! There is more to do in these node net-
works, as we'll learn in the next section.

Due to a bug in Blender's compositor, you may need to add an additional step here. During the fi nal render
for the entire animation including these Scene strips, I found that the compositing portion of the pipeline
was occasionally refusing to give back the RAM it had used, leading to a crash after a while. To avoid this, I
had to render around two thousand frames at a time, quit Blender, then resume for the next few thousand
frames. As you cannot render to the video formats incrementally like this, I was forced to render into a single
long series of .PNG fi les. When I fi nally had a sequence of .PNGs representing the entire animation, I simply
brought them back into the Sequencer, muted all the Scene, animatic, and storyboard strips, and rendered my
fi nal animation fi les all in one shot. Depending on the complexity of your fi nal compositing setup and how
many different shots are in your production, you most likely will not have to do this, but it is good to know
what's going on if you start experiencing crashes at this late stage.

Color Correction and More Post Effects

Before we begin creating new scenes for each shot and adding Scene strips to the Sequencer, we should fi nish the
basic composite network for the fi rst shot. We will add controls for color correction and any other postprocessing
effects that we would like to control on a shot-per-shot level. In The Beast , a glow was added to each shot. While
this glow could have been added in the composite setup during the initial render, effects like this are destructive.
Even though they enhance things visually, they irretrievably change the information that was contained in the
raw render. If you added effects during the render stage and later changed your mind or saw that the effects did
not work well from shot to shot, there would be no
way to go back short of rerendering everything.

If you build a good node network for the fi rst shot,
every time you duplicate that Scene for subsequent
shots the node network will already be in place. In
addition to using an RGB Curves node to match
overall color across shots, there are a number of
effects that can be found in the node editor. Figures
16.10 through 16.13 show several node types, along
with the effect they produce.

Figure 16.10 Glare