Film, Dump and Convert!

by - 2012/04/03 40 Comments Filming, Production

Today we have been testing the F65 camera at Cam-a-Lot.

It looks quite okay and is probably worthy delivering the footage for Mango. :)
Joris, our Director of Photography, seemed to have enjoyed it very much!
We shot all kinds of tests with it, more stops, less stops, green stuff, grey stuff, Ian, me and even some action scenes!




But: we can’t see it yet! It is stuck in a black box with green blinking lights from Sony. At the moment I am still sitting at Camalot and waiting for the data transfer to be finished. Having 4k footage is nice, but copying it is not very nice. Maybe there are still some bottlenecks so it might get better.
Basically, as far as I understood it, it works like this: You shoot 12 minutes of footage, then you have filled up a 256GB SSD card. This card you stick into a closed black box with blinking lights. You can access the footage on that card through network with a webbrowser. From there you can dump the Sony F65 raw footage as MXF files onto harddrives, one main, one backup. These harddrives will be hooked up to a Mac or a Windows machine with the F65viewer app on it. That can then be used to export the OpenEXR sequences and proxy videos onto the server. Then we will be finally in the save and open haven of linear image sequences.
I hope that soon I can grab the drive with the footage and bike home to the Institute to take the next challenge, the file-conversion. After that we can finally test the whole workflow and see what we can improve. So, no footage yet today!
More to come the next days!

Camera testing: Sony F65

by - 2012/04/02 28 Comments Filming, Production

Tomorrow we’re going to do tests with cameras from Camalot in Amsterdam. I’m very happy that we can also test (and most likely use) the new Sony F65 camera, which made everyone in the industry drool! More news & original frame samples will be posted here tomorrow.

-Ton-

Dick Maas going Blender!

by - 2012/04/02 13 Comments Production


Rob Tuytel invited the famous Dutch film maker Dick Maas to check on our work. He immediately accepted! This morning he showed up and spent an hour with us. He saw the full animatic and storyboards (“You should add more wide shots” – duly noted) and had a short demo from the artists (“Is all of that Blender? Amazing!”). I then spent some time with him on production stuff in general, how to organize & finance features efficiently here. I noticed he’d be very interested to direct a 3d animation film once!

He left with a huge pile of Blender training DVDs, we’ll be hearing more of him I bet :)

Mango Finished!

by - 2012/04/01 19 Comments Random

The mango project was almost single handedly finished by Sebastian today.

Click here to see the incredible video!

Thanks for all your support, guys. Couldn’t have done it without you.

Weekly – March 30

by - 2012/04/01 10 Comments Artwork, Production




After three weeks we already have a first version of animatic! Things went fast the first 3 weeks, with 5 weeks of time left still to tweak & refine (before filming starts). We also had the first designs in for the costumes! Casting info is still unknown, have to hunt the Casting Agent this monday. As weekly visitor we had composer Joram Letwory.

A Tale of Teslas

by - 2012/03/31 28 Comments Production, Random

Yesterday the courier arrived and we received the two – sponsored by Nvidia – Tesla computing units we’ve been waiting for days! It’s been a nice afternoon at the institute, with Sergey configuring the correct drivers in order to unleash the power of two cards and Ian making fruit smoothies to relieve the tension. More interesting information comes after the documentary “A Tale of Teslas”.

If you skipped the video, here the render time for the BMW benchmark file:

  • 1 Tesla: 1 min 4 secs
  • 2 Tesla: 34 secs

Although this result is not really comparable to the one obtainable with a GTX 580 (23 secs),  there is a main difference: Tesla cards have 6GB of memory, each. This means that in the dual configuration we could render a test scene (the bridge scene) with several GB worth of textures and data (otherwise impossible on a GTX).
The time for rendering such scene was:

  • Dual Tesla config: 5 mins
  • Dual Xeon rendernode: 15 mins

We are going to get Brecht over here very soon to see if he can improve the performances of Cycles on this cards. Will we eventually be able to replace the whole renderfarm with a GPU-based solution? We don’t know yet!

Currently we’ve put the cards next to more humble GTX 260’s in two workstations, this will help designing a lot. Special thanks to Nvidia for giving us these cards to test!

Open Street Maps import

by - 2012/03/30 14 Comments Development, Production

Campbell Barton ported the OpenStreetMap import script to 2.6 for us !

And it’s now in trunk.

The script loads XML files saved from the OpenStreetMap website (http://www.openstreetmap.org) into Blender (as edges).

This was quite helpful in blocking out the Oude Kerk area for mango (to correctly place the church and the buildings around)

Now, we’re integrating these maps with more detailed infos (necessary for the final models but also for animatic / previz purpose)

The the finer measurements will come from survey or more accurate plans  : city planning maps can be very useful in these situations (especially roads height measures)

We haven’t got those yet but we might be able to get all needed data from tracking (Sebastian is testing that on the ground surfaces  just now)

Tracking de Oude Kerk

by - 2012/03/29 13 Comments Development, Production

After finishing the Track, Match, Blend DVD this week I could finally start doing something more useful for the production.

In order to help with the reconstruction of the set at the Oude Kerk I have started tracking various shots that I took there, getting a more or less good geometry reconstruction out of that. But there is always a slight error margin in these tracks, so the resulting geometry is never 100% perfect. Still, it is very useful to get a sense of scale and proportion with some actual footage. The nice thing about Blender’s tracking system is the flexibility to link in several shots at once and align the cameras manually, to get multiple views aligned, and thereby getting a pretty big point-cloud reconstruction of the scene.

Continue

Production update: Composer Joram Letwory

by - 2012/03/29 11 Comments Production

March is nearly over, the filming dates (around May 10) are getting closer every day! So much todo :)

Here’s some news tidbits from the production department:

  • Composer & sound designer: Joram Letwory
    I’m already following Joram’s work a couple of years – yes he’s the brother of Blender developer Nathan “Jesterking” Letwory – and I’ve always been impressed with this work. More over, he’s not only a great composer and sound designer but even doing film and hiphop & dance clips! I’m very happy he accepted to help us with music and sound! It’ll be a tough job to work in the shadow of the great Jan Morgenstern, but it’s time to give a new talent a chance to get a public portfolio with a film soundtrack!
  • Ian and me had a meeting with production designer Romke Faber to go over a lot of practical filming details. He already did film design for several blockbusters here in the Netherlands. Needless to say – good quality films have production designers involved from the very beginning! For Mango, we have a lot of great artists on board already though, under Ian Hubert’s creative direction. For the filming itself however we can really use Romke’s help here. We’ll only have a week to film and we better make our sets & props work out perfect!
  • Rob Tuytel arranged us a surprise visitor next week: monday the famous director Dick Maas will be coming over for a studio visit! Dick is the renowned (and and first!) action & horror director we have in the Netherlands. His films usually give a nice level of controversy – with as many haters as lovers. His somewhat cheesy Dutch style is definitely well aligned with Ian’s American cheddar approach! It’ll be a fun visit ;)
  • Joris Kerbosch (DP) has already found us his crucial buddies for on the set; a Key Grip, a Focus Puller and a Gaffer! I need to settle deals with them first, then we’ll talk more about it.
  • Sebastian – finally done with dvd duties – now is refining our breakdown spreadsheet into fine detail for sets, props, etc. He’ll be doing preparations & tests for us as some kinda mix of assistant director & production designer. That’s what vfx supervisors do!

(Image: Joram)

-Ton-

Call for review: Blender Demoloop

by - 2012/03/29 25 Comments Random

Hi everyone!

Although this is not strictly Mango-related news, I would like to share it with as many blender users as possible. A few days ago Ton asked me to collect some nice blendfiles to use as Blender feature showcase for one of our sponsors: HP computers. This is called the Blender Demoloop and will be displayed on booths,  computers in stores, and so on. It will eventually fit on a USB stick as a portable demo. It will also be available for download under CC-BY license. I’m asking for support to the community for two reasons:

  • testing the demoloop and providing feedback
  • provide more/better contents for it

How to test the loop

You can download this archive (~300MB) and try opening either _start_demo_CPU.blend (cycles render will be done with CPU) or _start_demo_GPU.blend (cycles will use GPU). WARNING: you need a very recent (trunk) version of blender, which you can download here. Please be patient for a few seconds after you open the file, since the loop could take some time to start. If you encounter any issues please make sure to mention your blender build, OS and basic hardware config (RAM, GPU, ecc).

How to provide contents

Just leave comment here with a link to the content you would like to point out. We can accept only CC-BY, CC-0 contents. Your work will be properly credited of course.

Please help spread this message so that we can create an awesome showcase and prove Blender’s industry-level capabilities.

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