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Suggestions for rendering a 12-hour long slow-motion animation


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Hello!

 

I am working on a project which calls for an extremely slow motion 12 hour long animation. The client prefers for this not to be a looped animation but one single progressing animation. As I’ve never created an animation this long I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on the best way to go about this. The prospect of rendering a 12 hour long animation is blowing my mind. Does this seem like something I can animate at something like 180 fps and then time stretch in after effects or am I better off maybe using a render farm?

 

Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

 

Edited by Cerbera
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Maybe do a one hour animation at 30 fps (which is rediculous by itself) and AI time warping it to 12 hours? Of course you would need to do a lot of tests to see in advance if it looks ok, depending on movement speed and all that. Or ask the client if they can budget a million dollars or more for rendering.

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Hello! 

 

Thank you for your suggestions!

 

Do you mean 30 fps is already a lot of frames per second? Do you have any suggestion on how to go about doing this AI time warping? Is there a specific program you recommend for this or a tutorial?

 

Thanks!

 

 

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c4d always used to have a may frame limit, but I don't know if this still is the case. 

Calculating always helps me to understand things like that so lets go.

12 hours are 43.200 seconds with 30 fps that would be 1.296.000 frames if every frame needs just 15 seconds to render that would take one computer 225 Days of rendering. (please someone recalc that)

that is obviously not practical. Just render 1 frame per second would result in 7,5 days of rendering. that could be, like MJV said timerewarped. but do not underestimate the claculation time for that (if it takes 1 second per frame it will need an other 15 Days.

Data handling is gonna be also very difficult. everything is gonna need ages. a image sequence of 5MB pngs would be 6.5 Terrabyte of harddisk space.

 

all this doesn't sound great. I would generate one masterframe as start and end of severall long loops. lets say 10 to 15 min. then you can make a playlist in a player to orchastrate them like you need them for the 12 hours.

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Premiere has a great time remapping that seems to use AI to interpolate between frames, creating in-between frames that aren't simply a blend of the two surrounding frames, but create a completely new frame. I forget the exact name of it, but you simply select the track in the timeline, and choose the best time remapping option in the right click menu. I've never tried such an extreme slow motion though, but I've seen it be able to remap something 30 seconds long to 60 or 90 seconds with almost no difference to what you would get actually rendering at that speed.

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  • Solution

You've got to get seriously considered answers to a few key questions here:

 

1. What is the absolute minimum acceptable frame rate for the final viewed animation? Could be anything between 5 and 30 fps.

2. What frame size?

3. How is this going to be played back / displayed?

4. What is the nature of the content?  (Some content will be easier to time stretch than others).

 

And the critical questions:

Timescale?

Budget?

 

Has your client ever attempted anything like this before? Does he / she / they have any understanding of the work involved?  Or do they think it's just slightly harder than putting a Powerpoint presentation together : )

 

...then you can consider if it's even possible.

 

 

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Another possibility is, depending on how abstract this piece is, maybe explore the possibility of composing different parts of the animation together to create new visuals using two or more different parts. 

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You're mad

 

My first question in this type of situation is to get more details about how they are intending to use the video, why it needs to be 12 hours long and what sort of differences there need to be.

 

So for example clearly nobody is going to watch 12 hours of this video at any point in their lives, Im guessing its some art installation / centrepiece for a lobby etc. There's nothing wrong with a 12 hour long animation, its just, there has to be some element of re-use, or simplification to make it doable. Eg could it be a looping animation, but where you then colour correct it so it is different colours throughout the day. Or render on an alpha and have a slow evolving background to make it different.

 

Is it fast moving or super slow motion so you can hardly tell its moving? If its slow motion, and actually slow enough, you could be running a 1fps video and you wouldnt be able to tell anything is moving as such, but come back in 10 minutes and the animation would obviously be in a new pose.

 

I guess what im saying is, animating the minute hand of a clock doesnt need to be 30fps to be perfectly fluid. 1 frame per second might be fine. Or 1 frame every 10 seconds might be fine.

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Thank you to everyone who replied with some advice! I have talked to the client about how ill advised a non loooped 12 hour animation is with all the research i've done and forums ive posted on - they have agreed to a loop! Thankfully! 

 

Thanks again! 

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