Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project
After almost 10 days of uploading, the 650 GB of 16 bits TIF files arrived safely at xiph.org. Ralph from Xiph converted these to 16 bits PNG and mentioned it was actually 165 GB less data 
Both TIF and PNG are available there now.
Hopefully they can manage the bandwidth. Thanks for hosting it xiph.org!
We’re very interested to host and link to brand new superior encoded HD Sintel versions. Post urls here!
Although people have been publishing 4k camera footage in free licenses before, a Creative Commons release of an entire short animation film in original 4k non-lossy files could well be a world premiere!
Sintel in 4k – 4096 x 1744 pixels – has been made possible thanks to the support of the Cinegrid Amsterdam consortium, a group of research labs, new media and art institutes. The Cinegrid project will explore capture, creation, distribution, screening and archiving possibilities of Ultra High Definition (4k and 8k) content, based on making this technology accessible for a wide audience, such as independent artists, researchers or cultural events.
In the next decade, 4k Digital Cinema will become the new standard for film theaters. The movie industry is adopting this format quickly, but obviously locked up by DRM technology to keep full control over the content delivery pipeline. Blender Foundation therefore is very happy to participate in the Cinegrid project to help realizing an open and accessible 4k production and distribution pipeline as well.
Currently, the film is being distributed to all cinegrid.org partners world-wide for screening, research and demonstration purposes.
The original 4k version (8 and 16 bits per color, tif and png) now is available via the The Xiph.Org Foundation download site too, which is 160 GB of data! We are currently also uploading the 16 bits per color files, 650 GB of data, and which will be finished around 25 February.
Visit media.xiph.org/sintel for the 2k frames, 4k frames, and 5.1 soundtrack downloads.
Watching Sintel in 4k projection is a breathtaking experience, which you really shouldn’t miss when a screening is happening in your area. We will keep you informed about screenings on shows, conferences or festivals. I already know it will be shown at NAB in Las Vegas, and at Colin’s art college in Savannah.
Thanks,
-Ton-
I wanted to offer in this special evening a little gift , for your help and your support around Sintel and Chaos&Evolutions during this year 2010. Thanks again , and here is a timelapse commented of my watercolor technic with Mypaint and Gimp-painter.
Digital Watercolor with Mypaint 0.9 and Gimp-painter from David REVOY on Vimeo.
the picture :
For the pocessor of the the files or the DVD Chaos&Evolutions, here is an additional present :
An hidden timelapse is on the DVD ( yey ! I kept the secret during a long time ) .
To find it , go to the main menu , click on ”about” , and down the page , in the credit section ; you will find the sentence ” Thanks to my wife <3 ” . Just click on the little heart made of symbols to access the hidden timelapse.
Have a good Christmas time all !
-David
Hi everyone! Lee here.
With sintel complete, I had some time to put together my 2010 animation reel and can’t wait to begin a new adventure! I’m now putting myself out there as a free agent for freelance or emplyment at a company. Traveling, no worries!
My main skills lie in animation (In any package), but I can operate well as a Blender generalist. I must say I’m really excited to see what 2011 holds and all the fun projects and job opportunities out there. If you would like to get in touch with me, you can do so at lee@leewj.com . I also have a recent CV and references on the ready.
‘Epic’ Animation Reel 2010 – Lee Salvemini from Lee Salvemini on Vimeo.
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On a side note I thought it might be worth mentioning a new Blender educational website I’ve Co-Founded with ‘Yo! Frankie!’ artist Christopher Plush, CG Masters.
We’ve created two comprehensive training DVDs for the website launch.
‘Ninja Character Creation’ by Lee Salvemini’
‘Environment Modeling and Texturing’ by Christopher Plush’
We also have a nice, ever growing trove of Free Tutorials, including a continuing 2.5 training series. Feel free to have a peek!
Now the training DVDs currently available are *not* official e-shop DVDs, but we are blender certified trainers and both have worked on an open movie/game. If you haven’t bought the Sintel DVD, make sure to do so first!
Thanks to everyone for your continued support to all members of the community and the Blender Foundation itself! I hope everyone enjoys the last weeks of 2010 and has a very successful 2011!
Happy holidays!
-Lee
Looks awesome!, but..
4K is not a bed of roses, everything is (obviously) bigger and heavier to handle, previz, space on disk, moving files on the server, and so on. Blender suffers this internally as well.
On the render side (not compositing), the Blender internal did great, you’d expect twice the render time, but some shots did much less than that, I didn’t feel much difference locally, neither our farm did (bunch of quad i7 and some Xeon Octacores), but compositing is another story…
The biggest bottlenecks when rendering in Blender are in the compositor, even in 2K, in some cases calculating the Defocus node takes up to 50% of the render time, if you combine that with FSA (Full Sample Antialias, calculates compositing for each one of the samples, so if your OSA/FSA is in 8, it will do it 8 times..), it can go up to 80 or even 90% of the total render time. Ridiculous 
Possible solution? OpenCL! Tiled Compositing!, all the Blenderheads around the globe need you!, where do I have to donate?
Guess what we used for previz? Blender 2.49′s animation player! 
On my computer I even have set the ‘jpg’ and ‘png’ files to open with “blender -a” (where the 2.49b Blender binary is plus the ‘-a’ tag), so just opening one image from the sequence will load it.
But this player doesn’t scale down, so for that Blender 2.5 Video Sequencer was used. Since it frees memory nicely, not the case of the Image editor..
- Shadow Buffers!
- – Increase them, is veeery noticeable otherwise :/ takes a while, but is worth it.
- Nodes!
- – Some nodes were having issues on high resolutions, like FastGaussian’s Blur, it have been fixed in both Render Branch and Trunk, also the Defocus node wasn’t working properly on high res, didn’t scale well..
- Exploding Pixels!
- – Couldn’t really find out why, but has been fixed, some pixesl were extremely bright and when passed by nodes like glare, would explode in a nice rainbow effect, sadly not what the director was looking for 
- More super bright pixels
- – This ultrabright pixels (with float values of more than 10x!) sometimes need to be pulled down, otherwise they go over the range of colors and end up being a blueish spot in your render, there are many ways to do this but when you’re in a hurry the best thing is to just clamp them, so they are inside 0 and 1.0 again.
You can get this job done by using a “Separate RGBA” node, pass each channel (except alpha of course) through a “Map Value” node (enable Max and Min), then combine again with the “Combine RGBA”. This clamps the rgb values and they’re back to normal.
- Desert Shot
- – Missing lensflare and smoke sim :/
- Vignettes
- – Most of us used vignettes in the movie (dark corners and sometimes color correction), there are many ways to achieve this, some used a 4k image scaled down, some a 1k image scaled up, in my case I used an image at the beginning but switched to a Blend texture, since it scales automagically to the render-size, so is always right, and reliable.
But the images didn’t scale well before, had to be done manually and was a bit annoying, so I asked Diego Borghetti (bdiego) for a feature on the Scale node to scale whatever input to render-size, it worked out of the box and made its way to Render Branch and Trunk! thanks Diego 
- Workarounds..
- – There are many workarounds for bugs or non-bugs but weird behavior on some features, most of them are already reported and fixed but some old files in Sintel had this extra stuff that was messing with the final result, so these needed fixing..
One that is left is for example some times when you pass an image texture node through the Scale node, it outputs black.. no image, just black, so you need to convert this image first by passing it through a colorramp first.
Not really I got tempted and fixed some alpha issues here and there, and the floating collar dilemma on Proog’s shot (turns out the Ishtarian girl had her neck-thingie controlled by a constraint, and its influence set to 0.5!, just moving it up to 1.0 fixed the issue) but that’s all, the movie will be same as 2k, perhaps if we scale this version down we get better AA, but still, same classic Sintel you saw months ago online
OK I *really* have to go to the airport now, catching a plane back home!
I never thought I would get involved in Durian, now Sintel, it was an amazing project and extremely fruitful experience.
Thanks to the community for making this an even more awesome Open Project, without your support and cheering all the time this kind of projects wouldn’t be close as fun as they are.
Pablo, venomgfx, the Pinkifier as they called me on the team ♥
Since mid October we’re keeping our office warm with rendering 4k frames. Pablo and Dolf have been cleaning some errors and preparing all files for this breathtaking resolution. Some of you might have seen the sneak preview of shots at the Blender Conference, at a gigantic 4k screen!
All of the shots have been rendered now, but we suffer the obvious hair problems and occasional crashes still. Hopefully it’ll be done in a few days: this friday Pablo flies back to sunny and warm Patagonia!
Here you can download 5 random nice images from the farm:
http://download.blender.org/durian/4K_examples.zip
Pablo also collected a list of issues with current .blend files (as on the DVDs) and made a log for how-to rerender the film. Will be posted end of the week as well.
An official premiere for the 4k film has to be finalized still… but soon after all material will become available freely, as usual.
-Ton-
Hi all,
Of course we knew our girl Sintel has travelled far & wide… but as far as Indonesia?
Check out the ‘rip-off illegal DVD’ a friend of mine found in a DVD shop in Bali. Unfortunately they didn’t get all the names of the team quite right… but as my friend said: ‘what bigger compliment than an illegal copy of your film?’
Hope all of you enjoy the genuine Sintel DVD, and thanks for all the positive feedback!
x Esther
