Rendering and Editing The Film

 

A still from Scene Five featuring my Pokebot character

After a lot of issues along the way, it's finally time to render my final film. Over the past week or so I had attempted to do some test renders on each of the scenes in the final film to see how long it would take for my laptop to complete.

This is where I ran into an issue - after running for over 90 minutes, my laptop still hadn't completed rendering a single frame - in fact it was only on 8%. It was then that I messaged some of the people in my class to ask them if they had any suggestions for improving render times as there was no way I'd get anything dome otherwise. 

That's when someone suggested using a render farm and even recommended a few that I could try. After looking into the options I settled on Fox Render Farm and the speed that I was able to get things rendered was like night and day. I couldn't render a single frame in 90+ minutes and the render farm managed to render Scene 1 - which is 200 frames - in a little over 6 minutes.

After checking through each of the 200 images in Scene 1 and seeing that there were no issues, I pressed ahead and set up and submitted each scene to be rendered. Rendering with this render farm was really convenient in that I would point the software to where the Maya scene I wanted rendered was, and then it would analyse it and read all of the asset and texture files using the project settings related to that scene. As for defining the actual render settings - it worked the same way - I would set the render settings in Maya as I would normally do if I was rendering it on my machine and the software would read those settings and apply it to the render job,

A still from Scene Three

All in - I would estimate that the rendering process for all 8 scenes took about 2 hours using the render farm - which consisted of 748 frames, something I definitely wouldn't have been able to do using my own laptop.

Now, with all the scenes rendered it was time to take all the image sequences I had gathered and turn them into a video. In class it was recommended that we use DaVinci Resolve for this as it's free and professional grade software. However, given the extremely limited space on my laptop I had to find an alternative option. After a lot of research I chose Shutter Encoder. It has an extremely basic interface but it is relatively straightforward to use. To make the video using my images sequences I did the following;

Add all the images to the queue on the left

Set function to h.264 or AVI or any output you want

Under 'Bitrates adjustment:'

• Set 'Scale' to 1920x1080 (or any other resolution you want)

• Click 'VBR' until it says 'CQ'

• Set the CQ value to 21

• Enable 'Max quality'

Under 'Image sequence:'

• Enable 'activate the image sequence to 24fps'

Under 'Advanced features:'

• Set 'Force tune' to 'stillimage'

Start function

 Once I started the rendering process on the video it took about five minutes to complete. I rendered out the video in both MP4 and AVI. I chose to do that because AVI is the format required for assignment submission and MP4 because if I ever decide to add this to my portfolio, MP4 is a more widely used format across different operating systems and video playing software.

With the render now complete I brought it into YouCut on my phone to be able to edit it on the go. As part of the editing process I cut out some of the awkward scene cuts to try and make it look a bit more cohesive and add some music in the background.

Overall, I'm very happy with how the film turned out.