… tonight, I render …

... a long, long time ...

I have finished the first complete cut of the music video for the song “Combat” off of my forthcoming album “Bits”. I did all the real work on the film in After Effects CS3. The video is in HD – 720p (1280 x 720 square pixels 24 fps).

Eventually, I’ll have to render three versions of the film.

1) An HD version (1280 x 720 – square pixels)
2) A widescreen DVD version (720 x 480 – 1.2 aspect ratio pixels)
3) A web version (480 x 270 – square pixels)

I can’t just render the big one and scale it down. The problem is in the structure of the grain I’m overlaying on the footage. If I scale the movie down, the grain gets scaled down as well (and disappears), so I need to create three version of the film, each with an appropriate scale of grain.

... top – no grain, bottom – with grain ...

The grain may look exaggerated in the picture above, but once the film is set in motion, it has a completely different feel. It changes from frame to frame, based on the footage that it is being added too.

Why does it matter? Well … when I started making movies in the old days, I shot primarily on Super 8 film cameras. Video didn’t really do it for me and the (affordable) computers just weren’t up to task. Film was pretty kick ass and I loved the soothing effect the grain had on my subconscious.

Now that I’ve all but given up of Super 8 and gone digital, I’ve found that I need that grain there. Video noise just doesn’t cut it for me. It looks gross. AE CS3 has a flexible grain generator that has allowed me to design a grain that is suitable for the movie. Cool.

So let’s hit the render button and start the process of getting my movie out there!