4K Animation

For this year’s Mind 2 Movie Challenge, a few of us RMM board members decided to make shorties that would not be judged, just for fun.

The challenge was to include the following:

• A character named Bruce or Bryce Lemon, who has a secret.
• A clock.
• The line “This has never happened before.”

Then pick a genre from the Select-O-Matic 6000. I picked NOIR.

Since I was working in (mostly) vector animation, I decided to source mine in 4K as a proof of concept. I endeavour to learn something on every project, so I thought working out how to do 4K animation on something short would be a good idea.

What did I learn? The two raster images I used in my Flash project sized down in Flash and then up correctly in After Effects. (I run my animation through AE for final framing and camera moves.) So that’s good.

But After Effects wouldn’t let me output a Quicktime with h.264 compression at larger than 2000 pixels.  (For you Adobe nerds out there, the error message was “Output file will be resized from 4096 x 2160 (1.00 PAR) to 2000 x 2000 (1.00 PAR) to meet format constraints.”) Fortunately, I could do Cineform or Animation codec at 4K.

One nice thing about Youtube is it does take 4K uploads… not that many people can watch it that way. Still, here it is for your viewing pleasure: