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Hi everyone. We've recently started creating animations for various clients and finding that the composition process can be a bit lengthy. I mean, render times aside (which we expect to take time), putting the frames of animation together and exporting them out is taking a while. Being very new to this, I was wondering what techniques people are using to actually create a final animation (be it in Flash or into a video file) from Maxwell.

We're currently importing the frames to Flash, adding audio and overlays from there and exporting as an SWF file. After that we can take it into Premier Pro and convert it into most movie types without dropping in quality (leaving us with seperate Flash and movie files). Is this a pretty standard way to generate animations? Aside from the occasional crashing that Flash does when dealing with hundreds/thousands of frames, it does get us the results we need. But any tips on streamlining this process or general talk on what program(s) you use to collate frames together and export them would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

I use After Effects CS5 for all of the post work for animations. My biggest time saver I've found is to use Reel Smart Motion Blur plug-in instead of rendering the blur in Maxwell.

Cheers, Brian. Glad to know of the motion blur tip. Have you had a chance to use the Maxwell plugin for After Effects?

RobMitchell wrote:Cheers, Brian. Glad to know of the motion blur tip. Have you had a chance to use the Maxwell plugin for After Effects?

Yes, it's excellent! It's a little slower, but overall it's great working with 32 bit without having to extract EXR from all of the MXI frames first.

Why are you bringing frames into flash? Why not bring them directly into Premiere to edit?

Bubbaloo wrote:Yes, it's excellent! It's a little slower, but overall it's great working with 32 bit without having to extract EXR from all of the MXI frames first.

Good to hear. Will have to check that out!

dmeyer wrote:Why are you bringing frames into flash? Why not bring them directly into Premiere to edit?

The first couple we did needed to be provided as a flash file to the client, then when we needed to make movie files and just brought the swf into Premiere to re-export. We've done one more since then and just did it like that as well, despite not really needing to generate Flash files. :p We're thinking it's a step we could/should remove now though, unless there's a need for the swf.

Ya, take Flash out of the equation for sure. You will get double compression of your image sequence most likely would be the first issue. Also I can see this being very slow. Besides, that it is an extra step you don't need. Premiere can read sequences directly, it doesn't need to be video files. Also go uncompressed into Premiere, you will actually get better performance from your playback and encoding. BTW if you need to playback an animation in Flash you are much better off going with an .FLV or .f4V embedded or linked to a swf and use the video component to play it back. Otherwise you are using sequences in the time line and that gives you very little control over anything plus you will most likely get choppy playback depending on the files sizes etc.

sconlogue wrote:Ya, take Flash out of the equation for sure. You will get double compression of your image sequence most likely would be the first issue. Also I can see this being very slow. Besides, that it is an extra step you don't need. Premiere can read sequences directly, it doesn't need to be video files. Also go uncompressed into Premiere, you will actually get better performance from your playback and encoding. BTW if you need to playback an animation in Flash you are much better off going with an .FLV or .f4V embedded or linked to a swf and use the video component to play it back. Otherwise you are using sequences in the time line and that gives you very little control over anything plus you will most likely get choppy playback depending on the files sizes etc.

Thanks for the tips. We've now managed to quite easily work Flash out of the workflow and it's going well. We also got After Effects along with Premiere Pro so that's been fun to play around with. Adds a whole new world of options for animations and therefore rendering.