Perv's Diary: Week 69(NSFW)

Hey there friends! It's been a while that I haven't made a diary with some technical mumbo jumbo, today I got some free time so let's do another one!

First here's a shot from the upcoming release featuring Lightning & Serah for this month. 

Now for the mumbo jumbo.

Today I want to talk about video encoding and exporting methods.

For all my videos I use the h.264 codec, sounds complicated but it really isn't haha, that's the coded responsible for the very popular MP4 video format. Problem is ever since the overall I made to my animations since the Isabela release, I've been working with more and more renders layers, which results in multiple video layers during post-production.

Just for an example, during the old days I would use around 3 or 4 layers during post production. Nowdays sometimes I go up to 14 layers depending on the number of characters on screen! The reason layers are so addictive is because they offer much better control, you can have a layer for shadows, color, scenery, specific objects and so on. After you get the trick it becomes pretty much unlimited really, as you long as you have the time and resources to work on it of course.

So why does this matter when it comes to video enconding? Well due to the nature of some plug-ins that I use, I'm forced to encode the video layer by layer, which means first I export the main animation layer, then the scenery and so on. Depending on the video during the process there's a clearly loss of quality which was really bothering me. The issue become very apparent with both the Lightning & Serah video I've shown above and also the Lilith video I'm working on, which I'll show some previews in a few moments.

The solution was actually pretty simple, I'm now encoding the video in frames,  which means I build all the layers and stuff, make the post production and after that I export the video frame by frame with PNG format. I export all layers at once, frame by frame, If I end up not liking something I can simply go back to those exact frames I didn't like, edit the layers and export them again. It can be a little more complex to work with but there's no loss of image quality and I have even more control over the final result.

Just to point out this is also the method we usually use on 3D softwares, we render the animation frame by frame, we only transform it into an actual video with an video editing software later.

To show a cool example of layers I made a couple of previews from the Lilith upcoming release.

One of the tricks I'm using here is to actually have the cell shader on a separate layer haha.

First here's the animation layer(I made all backgrounds white to make it clearer).

As you can see it's not cell shaded.

Here's the actual cell shader layer below.

And finally here's the two merged together.

Well I believe that's all for today folks!

On the next week I intend to share more about the Jill Valentine patreon video, which I'm doing my best to also release it for this month.

Thanks and keep rocking!