Making the showreel

For our showreel, as we have specialised into comics, we thought it unnecessary to make conventional showreel, as I had already done one of these last year (see here) and only done a singular video brief since, (filming London Super Comic-Con). Therefore, doing another video showreel is not something worth doing. Instead, we decided to make an introduction to our comic, via a short animated video introducing the main characters, and scouting over the map to see where each character is from, ending with a contact information via G mail, our Facebook page and our Twitter page.

The video however, proved more difficult than anticipated. This was due to firstly After Effects simply not doing as key-framed. We would add a key-frame in, so a picture moved from point A to point B over the period of a second. But between point A and B, despite there only being two key-frames, After Effects would make the picture travel in a few loops, stutter, or move off camera to get from A to B. To counter this, we had to key-frame some images frame by frame to ensure this didn't happen and they travelled in the straight line as intended.

We also had some problems exporting the video, as the file size was 6.5GB. We loved the quality, but this was too big to fit on a disc wich is the way we have to fit in. After trying a few compression techniques via After Effects Encoder, reducing quality and some online guides, there appeared no successful way to get our video with a high quality, in 1920 x 1080 in H264. The videos would always seem to export jittery, attempting to frame blend or simply bad quality. To counter this problem, we ended up having to upload the full quality 6.5GB version to Youtube, and then re-download it, which kept the settings of HD 1920 x 1080 in H264 and reduced the file size to 101.1MB. The final video can be viewed via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHJBKYFZ5mM

The following day, we discovered a way of of reducing the file size without compromising the quality too much.  This was by instead of having a loss-less bitrate, we limited it to 50,000. We tired to limit it to 5,000, and even 10,000, but both these options still resulted in very noticeable quality reduction. So we settled with the 50,000 bitrate version, with a file size of 1.36 GB.