Movie Intro (1 Viewer)

[finrudd341]

I was having a play around with the custom movie intro on Moving Pictures, and having tried some of the excellent Cinema style options available, decided to have a go at my own.

While there is a great program called Blender that allows you to really get creative, this is a simple intro I made with photoshop pics, Windows Movie Maker and some patience.

I created the .avi file with Windows Movie Maker, added the audio with Virtual Dub, then converted it to divx with Auto_Gk.

Maybe a few more creative people out there can come up with some cool intros!

Have fun!

 

[cheezey]

I made a personal one with Blender, this took 36hours to render though as it's full 720p. The 20sec intro is 350Mb in size. I've attached a small version to show you what it looks like.

I keep meaning to create a few of these with MediaPortal or Moving Pictures text in it - but getting 36hour slots on the PC is a problem.

 

[finrudd341]

I want to give this a try with Blender - it really looks great, but I doubt my artistic ability to get this looking right. It certainly adds some very nice touches to the MediaPortal experience though!

 

[cheezey]

My artistic ability sucks too, I follwed a YouTube tutorial which had a link to a Blender template, just open it in Blender, edit the text, select your output size and away you go

You just need to source a the Fox movie intro audio and add it on (I can't find my copy of that).

 

[finrudd341]

I gave it a go last night, using a YouTube tutorial like you said - it looks intimidating, but is actually quite user-friendly!

I just need to find the audio now, so I can add that in (and re-do my first rather naff attempt, which the wife gave a very firm 'no' to )

 

[cheezey]

Try this - it's 20sec long so make your movie intro that length.

 

[finrudd341]

Many thanks - sounds ideal! I started the Anim process this morning at 9am, with a full HD dimensions, and at 6pm it's still running, and 350 frames of the 600 done! Luckily I didn't try it on the old PC I normally use, as I am on holiday on Thursday night this week

Once I have done the Anim process, I then have to Render it right? I heard some people talking about 36-hours to get it all done - I had assumed that was 36 man-hours of moving each frame manually, and had not realised it was that long on the PC processing it all - wish I had tried this sooner now.

 

[RoChess]

I'm using an existing intro from Dolby that is 20 seconds long with a very nice surround sound effect. It even passed WAF, which is crucial in my situation. It's available as M2TS with lossless TrueHD sound quality at the trailer site mentioned in FAQ, but most users will not have support for that, so I've converted it into AC3.

The result is a 22MB MKV file with 1920x1080 H.264 DXVA video and 640Kbps 5.1 AC3 sound @ drop.io introhd

 

[cheezey]

Once I have done the Anim process, I then have to Render it right?

Don't think so - once your anim process is finished you should have your finished (but silent) movie clip.

 

[finrudd341]

Sucess - I have my completed video clip, which is 345MB, and am using VirtualDub to add in the .mp3 audio. The end result comes out at a massive 2.19GB - does this sound right? Seems the end result is way larger than the sum of the parts? I am going to have to play around with the VirtualDub settings and see if I am doing something wrong - any ideas?

Still - it's looking good, and was well worth the 15 hours

Edit: I ran it through Auto Gordian Knot to turn the output into an Xvid Codec, and the completed result is down to 10MG. I think what I had done wrong was used uncompressed avi on the Blender settings, as there did not seem to be any other Codecs that looked right.

Very pleased with the end result, but have yet to try it on the big screen.

Thanks for all your help.