The Astronaut's Dream

[artnik]

This is the latest piece I've been working on.. "The Astronaut's Dream."

An astronaut lost in space dreams of falling through a black hole and is transformed by the experience. Animated and rendered completely within Magic Music Visuals. Music is "Modulation of the Spirit" by Little Green Men (freemusicarchive.org).

This is the second version, and although I edited it to remove some detail, VIMEO's recompression has still done a number on it. The original uploaded file was 50Mbit, and looks gorgeous locally, but I guess you simply can't have every frame show motion across the entire frame and expect it to hold up. Live and learn.

Amendments to the original project were to remove a lot of feedback and gradient lighting effects where possible, and switching red objects to blue and increasing their contrast.

Any workflow advice on planning for recompression to maximize quality would be greatly appreciated. For this project it was exported straight to MP4 at 50Mbit/sec from MMV and uploaded without any other modification. Cheers!

[Magic]

Very nice! I downloaded the original 1.2GB file .

The problem with YouTube/Vimeo/etc. is that they compress the video more (to save bandwidth), and high-compression videos have a particularly difficult time with animation, because most codecs are optimized for natural camera footage. Animation, especially abstract animation, often has lots more detail and contrast than real life, and also more fast movements.

I've done several tests where I uploaded totally uncompressed, immaculate animations with huge file sizes (many GB) to both YouTube and Vimeo, and they still ended up looking like crap. So the issue isn't how the video looks on your end. It's just what YouTube/Vimeo do to it.

Really the only thing you can do is upload in as high a resolution as possible. For example, this guy is a world-class animator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIwg10ZAGiQ. But as you can see, he recommends to set the stream to at least 1440p (!) for a decent video quality, even if you are viewing it at a smaller resolution, just because 1440p is provided more bandwidth by YouTube.

[TheLaughingBuddha]

I had a prob with my HD vids only being shown at low res on YT....but after reading some posts about it...apparantly when you first upload they will show as low res...but 30 mins later they will be HD.
This probably isnt what you are talking about but here it is .
Regards

[artnik]

Thanks for the detailed reply Eric (and for blowing the bandwidth lol). I'd suspected that the codecs weren't tuned for graphics, but it's good to know that for sure.

Have a great weekend!