How to transfer your Blender movie to the big screen
Have you ever wondered what it takes to transfer your Blender work to a 2K digital movie screen? Johnny Matthews shares his experience in this blogpost.
I recently started in on a project for a friend of mine to create an advertisement for his small chain of movies theaters to play before movies. I’ve done plenty of animations before, but I had never thought about what it would take to get it on the screen. It turns out to do it right, you need more than just a quicktime file. Here is the process I went through to make it work. I pulled tidbits from various websites to get the whole process. I’ll link to ones I used at the bottom of this post.
Hi Johnny, Thanks for posting this article. Really useful info tucked in there :) btw I’m commenting here cause comments didn’t seem to be workin on your blog. I was also wondering is it possible to render to a jpeg2000 sequence from Blender?
I think it is possible on some systems. But I remember coming across a comment somewhere about a compatibility issue between blender’s JPEG2000 and the DCP workflow. One upside is that TIFF is a pretty universal format and those source files could easily be reused for other types of final output.
would it not be possible to do this whole work flow with Tiff images because they hold more information, and not convert to Jpeg 2000.
Or do you have to convert to Jpeg 2000.
The reason why I ask is because I have a hatred of Jpeg anything because it compresses the image to much and you loose to much of the detail, although on screen it looks fine when you zoom into the images, they are nearly useless.
agreed, the JPEG format is terrible. when I first started using blender I would create a lot of my textures as .jpg and now that I come back and touch them up, I realize how much detail was lost in the process. the spec maps had strange color artifacts and the surface direction in my normal maps suffer from the compression the most since even the subtlest color detail shows up in the reflection. ever since I have been using TGA and DDS (but of course most cameras save images as JPEG by default and some as the only option), thanks JPEG I want quality back!
I think Jpeg 2000 support lossless compression mode.
Also about the only thing JPEG and JPEG2000 have in common is the reference in the name to the Joint Photographic Expert Group. It uses a completely different algorithm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000
Also if you want to encode for Digital Cinema Package, you have to use JPEG2000. That is the standard. Also from what I understand Digital Cinema systems use hardware based decoders for the lossless compression. That’s how they can manage to display 2k and 4k resolutions at high framerates.
http://www.barco-silex.com/ip-cores/jpeg-2000
Now I understand.
JPEG2000 is the only accepted compression format for DCP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package
I use 16 bit TIFF because the openDCP tool I use works well converting 16bit TIFF files to JPEG2000.
I wouldn’t use Tiff at all. As Tiff has different color profiles on Mac pc and linux. I’d stick with Targa.
openDCP can accept TIFF, DPX, or BMP for conversion to JPEG2000 which is the required format for a DCP.
BMP works as well. I was just warned during production never to use TIFF in case you ever need to switch between OS.
As long as you use a format that can get to JPEG2000 then you should be good to get to DCP.
TIFF images are the preferred format. If any color profiles are embedded in the tiff, they will be ignored by OpenDCP.
I did this the fist time one year ago :-)
This is my Blender Project from last week:
https://vimeo.com/97711810
I don’t understand the part in this chart where .wav files are converted into a sequence of .jp2 frames.
Doh! Those should be 24bit WAVs. I’ll fix the graphic.