Testing Grounds

Title: Promotional Video about GNOMEs Documentation
Started: April 21st 2014
Deadline: July 26th 2014
Status: voice-over done, recording video material, brainstorming animations.

status-visualized.

The GNOME Documentation Video marks my 2nd video for GNOME and I expect it to be finished before GUADEC. Currently, I am writing down notes, sketching ideas and recording some video. The picture below is my current timeline in Blender’s VSE (red are video recording notes, blue are animation notes).

Status-May-25th

Having notes in the timeline is super flexible for me because I like to work a little bit on everything and revising the design over and over. I expect to have 5-6 layers of material, starting from audio, notes and sketches, to video-recorded material/animations and finally transitions and sound effects.

This time I am spending more time tinkering with various workflows, exploring Blender’s various capabilities and finding the best way I can use the tools I have available. Concretely this means that I am moving much of the work previously done in the compositor into 3D space (cycles) or the VSE. My aim with this is to utilize blender’s real-time rendering as much as possible, so I don’t have to pre-render parts of the video when I make changes. I am also taking Jakub Steiner’s advice and trying to keep everything within one file which I am trying to keep tidy.

Thanks to Karen Sandler who provided me with a great voice-over. It is super motivating to work on a video like this when you have a high-quality crisp voice to work with. Looking forward to be showing off some initial work soon.

3 thoughts on “Testing Grounds”

    1. Hi David,

      I agree, the VSE transform addon is great! I will surely be using it for basic 2D effects. What I especially like about it is its ability to set its interpolation to ‘none’, meaning no decrease in the quality of video material when animating it (limits your animation a bit, though).

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