Suggestions for Making Animation Look Better
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Hello,
Below is one part (of twelve) of an animation I'm working on to show how various polyhedra fit together in a sphere. I am pleased with the geometry and how things look within sketchup, but I'd like to improve the quality of the exported video. I have been trying many different things, and would appreciate some expert input.
I'm not even sure what the main problem is -- something about the colors or the shadows or the edges.... just seems like you can't see the individual 2D shapes as well as you should be able to (and they look better within sketchup), and it's all a little blurry.
I wonder if I should be using a render application, something I don't know much about, or if there are settings I can change within sketchup that will improve things. Or is there a better way to do the animation export? Or is this just a design issue with background colors or something like that? (I'm a math teacher -- art/design is not my forte).
The animation is made with the keyframe animation plugin, at 24 fps (for tweens and export). This version was exported as 1280 x 960 png files, which I reduced to 640 x 480 using faststone resizer, and then I put the images together using virtual dub (I learned about all these things from this forum -- thanks). I did make an earlier version just using the native sketchup animation with moving the camera, but it was too jerky in places, and that part is better w/the keyframe.
I made this in parts where I rotate 90 around green, then red, then blue, then repeat .... this gets everything back to the beginning, and so I only have to rotate the layers that are in that part of the animation (there are also cubes, octahedra, etc.)
Thanks in advance.
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Hi,
Nice animations! If you find that the sketchup view port looks better then allow me to recommend a screen capturing software called Fraps. The resolution is very good I find and also as a plus since you are a teacher you can record your voice explaining the geometry so you can maybe post them on youtube so everyone can learn.
Renderiza
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Thanks, glad you like the video. My plan was to edit so that viewers would have the option of showing the names of the polyhedra (in the closed caption), but to have music rather than my voice for the sound track. Do you know how hard that would be with fraps?
I have used cam studio a lot to make screen casts for my classes, although not with sketchup. I hadn't thought to use a screen capture here, appreciate the idea. I would like to understand better why the quality goes down with what I'm doing, though.... but it's good to have another option if I can't work it out.
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@blueglass said:
My plan was to edit so that viewers would have the option of showing the names of the polyhedra (in the closed caption), but to have music rather than my voice for the sound track. Do you know how hard that would be with fraps?
Adding music is easy with a free software like 'Windows Live Movie Maker' or 'iMovie'. I know that fraps record internal sounds so playing a music while recording might be another way. Also a reason to use 'Windows Live Movie Maker' is to reduce the file size since the video 'Fraps' export is very high in size but doing this is very easy to do.
@blueglass said:
I would like to understand better why the quality goes down with what I'm doing,
Not so sure about this but let me point out that maybe it is the codec the video player use to display the animation. I for example used SimFonIA Animation Tools to export animations videos and while playing the exported video with 'VLC' video player I was getting significantly better resolution than playing the same video with 'Windows Media Player'. Regardless the animation looked way better inside SketchUp so using Fraps might be better, although if the machine can't handle real time playback because of the complexity then 'Fraps' is not an option.
Here is a video where I used 'Fraps' to record everything except when I show the animations because I used the export option from within Sketchup. Notice the diference in quality...Hope this shows that screen capturing might return better resolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZcK-SYRFJg&feature=plcp
You said you use 'Cam Studio' and that is fine if you are not recording real time animations because it might cause heavy video lag. That is why I recommended Fraps because it specifically designed to record CPU intensive playbacks as games and things like that. Note that 'Fraps' only records the view port window so it ignores anything else like the menus and stuff like that so it might be handy to keep 'Cam Studio' if capturing menus is necessary.
By the way it is really cool that a teacher is thinking outside the box to make learning fun!
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Hello you two,
Another interesting animation, it looks like you have passed the word this weekend!
If you are a math teacher I think it would be interesting if you try SAT (SimFonIA Animation Tool, there is a free demo). Its use involves geometric concepts (Coordinate system, vector, transformation ...) that you probably use every day.
At the moment some physics teachers use it to illustrate their lectures, I think the potential in mathematics is equally interesting (I would have really liked to be taught geometry in space visualy).About the exported video resolution, we usually use individual images which are stored in the folder "SATTemp" during the export (c
/ SATTemp, depending on your installation). We then use "VirtualDub" to create an HD video from these images.Did you try the WebGL exports?
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I am glad we are having this conversation because it made me do some tests and I have found the real issue!...evil laugh ahead…HAHAHA!
Ok the images that 'SimFonIA Animation Tools' exports are truly HD so no issues there…The problem is when “VirtualDub” compiles it to video form, then the image loses resolution but it is still good quality video in my opinion. My test was to compile the images in the ‘c
/ SATTemp’ folder myself using Adobe After Effects and the result was a perfect resolution!The other problem that this created was that the format was swf which can't be used in 'Youtube'. This meant I used a converting software called 'Sothink SWF to Video Converter' and again the resolution went down although not as much as before. Then I tried using 'Fraps' to record the 'swf' video and it was better but it still took resolution away. I re-uploaded the resulting video to 'Youtube' as a test but both videos look almost identical in quality.
If you want to see the youtube test go to my channel and also I will leave a Drop box link if you are interested to see the SWF video quality.
http://www.dropbox.com/sh/x1gs5e0t3itf8ab/VixDKxjb-g
Hope this helps!
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Sorry for the slow response time -- been crazy busy, but Rafael, I just checked the stills that I exported from sketchup, and they are much higher quality than the video -- so definitely the issue is either virtual dub or the codec (or both).
I looked up after effects and they do have an educator subscription rate where I could try for a month for not that much money, so that might be worth a go. Here is a forum link that you might find helpful regarding getting avi directly from after effects http://forums.adobe.com/thread/478655 (I have never used the software, so can't comment on quality, but fingers crossed that this could be a solution). I will experiment some more and post anything interesting.
I liked your first video -- those are very fun animations, plus nice to be able to get menus within sketchup. I will check out SimFonia in the future, although I do first want to figure out the next steps w/what I've already done. Yesterday I talked to my friend (another math teach, but much more musical than I am) who is going to try to compose some music to go with it.... I want to get something up for him so he can get going, even if I'm still working on improving the quality.
This has been very helpful, many thanks.... oh, and I will check out your second video later.
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Hi,
Thanks for the link that explained how to export videos as 'avi' format since I previusly didn't know how. Even though compiling the video as avi with After Effect resulted in little bit more quality than before the reality is that it is still not as good as exporting as 'swf' fotmat. I was using the default settings so maybe there is still room for improvments but not sure. Hopefully you will be satisfyed with how the video will turn out even though the swf file will look better.
Cheers!
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I've been playing around -- first I wanted to see whether Virtual Dub or the codec was the problem, so I exported from virtual dub without any compression at all, and it looked great. So the codec is the issue; Virtual Dub is fine. Then I tried a different codec; since my camstudio videos look good, I tried that one, and it looked great. I thought my problems were solved, but then when I uploaded to youtube, it looked the same as originally.
So a lot of the problem is conversion to youtube format.
I've been playing around with other things, and I got it better, although not as good as I'd like. I made the video from 1280 x 960 stills instead of the smaller ones and did the aspect ratio as 16:9 instead of 4:3. Below is the result (I accidentally cut off the end when I was exporting the tweens, but it doesn't matter).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W52BWyVL010&feature=youtu.be
It is very helpful to be able to bounce ideas around like this.
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ps -- I think I also need to up the frame rate, but that is easily done...
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Thanks Renderizer, I will check it out. Sadly I am not a math teacher, and if I could do math I could probably rule the world. I think I had been sent out on a errand somewhere when those chips were being installed prior to the storks delivery. I am seriously bad. More accurate to say a math moron, and without a calculator I would be reduced to laying out pebbles on the sidewalk to even know if I had received enough change from a store purchase.
That being said... it has not made anything that I do with the graphics world easy. I will take a deep breath and delve into this and have a look at the plugins mentioned. I have no problems with the 2D exports, they look wonderful. I will also do some Youtube searching (thank Heaven for Youtube!!!) and see if there are any videos posted that might be helpful.
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