My demoreel and website
polycounter lvl 10
High i jsut graduated last week and put a demoreel together and made a site for myself:
I was hoping i could get some comment and criticism on everything and anything...
i would like some peoples opinion on weather, the work i have to date is good enough to be doing this professionally yet, at a decent studio. and just and Idea at the sort of thing i should be aming for right now. not to restrict myself, but just to have an idea for myself.
www.dalesenaratne.com
Can i get some opinions as to weather the theme seems too childish. and not professional enough. I just didn't' want to make it too boring, but i also wanted it simple.
I'm having a lot of trouble with the compression. Right now that tiny 1 minute 30 second video is over 8 mb (in FLV)
the quicklime files are from 50mb to 37mb to 27mb for high med and low resolution all using h264 (Sorensen 3 takes away a lot of contrast) compression at about 70% at 25 frames per second. I seem to remember downloading stuff, with much more footage but relatively tiny file sizes, with good watchable quality.
As for the FLV version, i've seen much better quality video streaming online. but perhaps they were large files. but 8 mb still feels gigantic. Perhaps adobe Encore does a better job than Riva....but i dont' have Encore...
Any an all other comments and critism are welcome...and apreciated in advance
thank you
I was hoping i could get some comment and criticism on everything and anything...
i would like some peoples opinion on weather, the work i have to date is good enough to be doing this professionally yet, at a decent studio. and just and Idea at the sort of thing i should be aming for right now. not to restrict myself, but just to have an idea for myself.
www.dalesenaratne.com
Can i get some opinions as to weather the theme seems too childish. and not professional enough. I just didn't' want to make it too boring, but i also wanted it simple.
I'm having a lot of trouble with the compression. Right now that tiny 1 minute 30 second video is over 8 mb (in FLV)
the quicklime files are from 50mb to 37mb to 27mb for high med and low resolution all using h264 (Sorensen 3 takes away a lot of contrast) compression at about 70% at 25 frames per second. I seem to remember downloading stuff, with much more footage but relatively tiny file sizes, with good watchable quality.
As for the FLV version, i've seen much better quality video streaming online. but perhaps they were large files. but 8 mb still feels gigantic. Perhaps adobe Encore does a better job than Riva....but i dont' have Encore...
Any an all other comments and critism are welcome...and apreciated in advance
thank you
Replies
Your work is good, presentation is nice and to the point, although I'm not a big fan of that collage on your front page. Thumbnails being there instead would work better for me. I like that you show construction sheets and polycounts, but it would be nice to see some high poly sculpts as well. I'd like to see some more models, especially since you have a variety of stylized/cartoony and realistic, and it would be nice if you could show that realism is also your strength on another strong, realism focused piece. Also, I think the human characters would look better if you pose them too.
Not to be mean, but since you asked for comments on anything and everything, I thought I would note that your writing needs serious attention, and by that I mean you should work on your spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalization of letters.
And welcome to Polycount
Alex
As for compression all I know is that we always use Sorenson Video 3 at my school..so i dunno
The player for the demo reel resets back to 00:00 whenever I click the scrollbar, for some reason.
<ASX VERSION="3.0"> <ENTRY> <REF HREF="YourFile.wmv" /> </ENTRY> </ASX>QuickTime is pretty easy too, though you have to fork out $30 for the pro player. But Apple has a great tut for compressing to H.264, which is an excellent all-around codec. Worth the money, unless you have another app that puts out QT.
De-interlacing isn't always great, really bad on text. Movie Maker does a decent job though, so does QT Player Pro.
I knew it looked familiar
@fogmann
It Seems that Riva FLV Encoder did de-interlace the video, or at least the check box labeled "Deinterlace" was checked. I could upload it to youtube, but i don't know how good a youtube player would fit in on my site. And, I can't seem to find the option for exporting to FLV in quicktime, I could possibly have an older version i'm ont 7.1.3. it has a bunch of other types but no flv.
I'm not sure I understand but it seems like you mean instead of the collage, put all of those images i have there in it's own little box. which seems worth a try. As for more work, this is all I've done so for, I will add more of these pieces as i get them done.
=p and thanks. I understand that my spelling and written grammar is terrible, but I should really work on it. By the way, do you mean on the site? or in my post? :S i kinda checked over the site several times I hope there arn't too many mistakes there I've already sent it out to people.
@Sage
Thank you
@Firecracker
Thank you.
We used Sorensen 3 at school as well. I found it made the footage loose a lot of it's contrast. I did a bunch of test and h264 seems to offer the same files size and quality..but retains more of the contrast.
@Ghostscape
yes, I've been to that site before. I've noticed that they do look a lot alike, but I didn't' steal it. My site template originally was a tree with a branch going across at the top, and a swing/ladder thing tied to it....which is what it still is...except I cropped of the top because it looked ugly. Regardless, i do go to that site very often for the tutorials, and to see his work. and it clearly has influenced how i put my site together. but i wasn't actively trying to copy it.
@EricChadwick
I don't seem to have Movie Maker....yea..strange. The quicktime video's I have for download are compressed with h264, thanks for the code, I' will use it if I can get an wmv to look nicer than what i can get with a FLV
I was planning to create 3 wmv files, for download originally to go with he 3 quicklime files.
Anyhow thank you to everyone for the comments and criticisms. I will try some of the encoding methods mentioned any post them.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx
I'll mention superC, since it's free and it encodes nearly all video formats, but it's not the easiest software to work with, and the website purposefully makes you hunt thru three pages to get the final download link (supposed to make you read the FAQ first, yeah right). Might be worth a look though, actually does a great job if you know a thing or two about encoding.
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html