#workshop 8

For this animation, I had to use the 3D Camera tool in After Effects to reveal the text of a haiku of my choice. I chose a haiku called "You Only Live Twice" by Ian Fleming:

"You only live twice. Once when you are born. And once when you look death in the face."

I used a Dark Grey solid as the base and stacked every following layer on top of it. For the text, I chose the Bold version of the Futura PT font and had the word "Twice" split into two as a reference to the poster for the film "You Only Live Twice." Each piece of text also fades in and out using keyframes in Opacity.

From there, I used shape layers to create a baby for the second stanza and animated it rocking back and forth. For the third stanza, I used shape layers and the Trace tool to create a version of the Grim Reaper inspired by the character of Death from Family Guy.

In this weeks workshop we focussed on compression and the variation between file format and video format. Compression is used to render original content such as videos with fewer bits in order to reduce the size of the video. There are two types of compression, loseless and lossy. Lossless compression uses the original video size whereas lossy compression reduces the bitrate of the video’s content to make the size smaller.

As for compression there are two different formats, video format and file format. File format is the container of the video and decides what types of video players are able to playing that video file. For example, .mp4 is a file format and can be viewed on video player such as Windows Live Player and QuickTime. Video format is the type of compression that will be used on the video, and decides the quality of the video and like video format, the type of video player capable of playing the video.

When it comes to compression of a video whether it’s an assignment, workshop or commercial use ensure that its compatible with all platforms. An example is .mov and .wmv file formatted video. Videos that are formatted in .mov is specifically catered to apple products and .wmv caters for window products. This means that both .mov and .wmv aren’t cross platform formats and can be a nuisance when showing your work.

For the workshop I was assigned to use five compression codecs onto the montage editing video done for Workshop 8 assignment. A loseless codec consisting of 10/10 quality and lossy codecs consisting of 1/10, 3/10, 5/10 and 7/10 quality.

Lossy Codec - 1/10 For the 1/10 quality version of the Montage Editing video I used a .mp4 file format with a H.264 codec video format. To decrease the quality of the video I reduced the bitrate down to 1,000 Kbps to demonstrate that as the bitrate reduced the quality did as well. As the kbps reduced the video then became pixelated.

Lossy Codec - 3/10 For the 1/10 quality version of the Montage Editing video I used the same file format and video format codec for the 1/10 version, but decreased the bitrate to 3,000 kbps. There was a significant change but was still slightly pixelated which wasn’t as noticeable as the 1/10 version.

Lossy Codec - 5/10 The same file format and video format codec was used for that of the 5/10 lossy version. The bitrate was reduced to 5,000 kbps and the size of the file went to 45.2 MB. The quality was better and had little trace of pixilation.

Lossy Codec - 7/10 The same file format and video format codec was used for 7/10 lossy version. The bit rate was reduced to 7,000 kbps and the file size went down to 62.4 MB. Compared to that of the 5/10 quality, it was barely noticeable that these were two different videos.