Working follow focus test setup!

Yes! It works!

It works a little better than the video shows, but it's a little too noisy right now, and still has some kinks to be ironed out.

Video with the Canon M500

Scene one test, now with sound!

I've been playing around with some ideas for the first scene soundtrack and the first set of credits. Here's what I've got right now. Let me know what you think!

The taming of the Frankenstein.

Well, I think I fixed it. It's rendered 300 frames or so (about half) without crashing, so I may have solved the problem. I restarted my computer, and this time resisted the urge to open my web browser. I opened Blender, and disabled Save Buffer, Instances, Free Unused, and Local Coordinates. (I think, if I remembered right). It also seems to be rendering somewhat faster too. I'm seeing render times of about one minute on my main computer.
 The main problem I see when I look at it is that my animation skills are abysmal.
Josh, would you be willing to try animating it, and then sending the .blend file back for me to render?

Update: It's around frame 550 now! I may be able to get a video out tonight!

Satellite, asteroid, and earth

I now have the satellite, earth, and asteroid all rendering together! There are still a few glitches though, see the image below.

There are still several issues with this render. The .blend file is getting so complicated I'm going to start .blend file version 3 soon to try to simplify it. Here are the current problems I see with this render.
1. There is a outline around the asteroid.
2. The glow effect that looks good on the satellite up close doesn't scale down well. It looked O.K. when the satellite took up most of the screen, but now it just makes it look blurry.
3. I would like to have some sort of depth of field.

Anyway, I'm going to start working on blend file version 3, and see how that goes. It's really coming together nicely so far.

First scene update!

I've been working on the first scene some. I've learned quite a bit, and made some good progress. I have previously posted renders of the satellite and the earth, but never combined, as one was in Blender Internal render engine, and the other was rendered in Cycles. It turns out that compositing them is actually pretty easy. Here are some early renders, I'm pretty excited about this:

And, just for fun, here it is again with the alpha channel:

(I don't know how the blog will display the alpha channel. I uploaded it as a .png, which supports alpha channel as well as the standard RGB. In the Linux image viewer it has a nice alpha checkered background)

I'll try to post a link to the blend file soon, which brings up a question; are we willing to use Blendswap for this movie, or should we stick to posting or e-mailing links to Google Docs? Please reply in the comments below.

Here's a screenshot of the node setup, as you can see, nothing too complicated, right?

Wrong! (and only one of the node groups is expanded!)

I just figured out how to use node groups, and it can drastically cut down on clutter in the node chain.

Asteroid to be added soon!

2.5K camera

The market for high resolution digital cinema cameras is really expanding. It's really interesting watching right now, when there's so much competition. Prices are also falling, which I like! Right now, I know of two different 2K RAW cameras for about $3000. That's still pretty expensive, and they don't include lenses either, but that's still less than something like Canon's 5D MK III.

Below: A photo of Black Magic Design's 2.5K camera from their website.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/blackmagiccinemacamera/

It's really neat seeing what's happening right now. Another big plus of this camera is that it records to 2.5" SSDs, so recording media will be easily available, not proprietary, and it will also be easy and quick to transfer data.
Anyway, this isn't exactly related to the project, but it is of general interest. At the rate things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if we shot our next film in 2K! Maybe wishful thinking, but you never know...

720p vs 1080p

I really don't want to make this choice... But, it does have to be made. If I remember right I said a while ago that we would probably shoot this in 720p. However, I've been working with video, (from the 1D MK IV), and 1080p really looks drastically better than 720p. Some of this may be due to the fact that I'm viewing the video on a real screen, uncompressed from the camera, not a YouTube version on a smartphone. When we're done though, I want to be able to put this in our home theater and show it to friends without being ashamed of it (thought I'm sure I will be able to see / hear flaws)
The problem here is that we can shoot 24 or 30 frames per second 1080p, OR 60fps 720p. The 1080p looks much better, but it only takes 30 fps, so slow motion will be very limited. Right now, I'm thinking we will probably shoot the trailer in full 1080p to get a feel for it, and see if that will be feasible for the whole thing. It's possible that we could shoot the film in 1080p, and switch to 720p for the slow motion parts, but I don't think we'll do that.