I was so into it, that I wanted to look for a higher quality version.
They have a high quality version for download on the internet, but it's
not Blu Ray quality. I know that's asking a lot, but comon... I'm a
quality freak! :) After browsing around their website, I discovered an
area that is essentially an index of lossless files related to Elephants
Dream. They had a folder of 1920x1080p renderings of every single frame
in PNG quality. To top it off, they had all 6 channels in FLAC (Free
Lossless Audio Codec). Everything was there in losslessly compressed
format, so I did what any crazy person would! I snatched em up. I had to
download around 20 gigs of files, but it was worth it. The only thing I
had to do next was reconstruct it in the quality that meets the "Neil
Seal of Approval."
Converting Images to
Video
After downloading all of the PNG images, I had several ways I could
convert them to an AVI file. The average joe would just toss them into
Virtualdub and output as an uncompressed AVI file--but, let me put this
into perspective. PNG is already a compressed (albeit lossless) format.
Uncompressed AVI would be like taking those PNGs and converting them back
to BMPs. At 20gigs, 1920x1080 resolution, the required harddrive space
would be quadruple that (if I'm even that lucky). Resaving as AVI was out
of the question. I could have saved using one of many lossless Huffyuv or
Lagarith codecs, but I had only enough harddrive space to download those
images. I was really pushing it. Luckily, I know my way around MeGUI, the popular graphical
user interface for creating high quality H.264 videos. It relies heavily
on AviSynth scripts, which are basically text files that contain scripts
which control how the video will turn out. An Avisynth script is merely
kilobytes and was the ideal solution to my problem.
So, I created an AviSynth script using a special script for converting a
sequence of images into a video. Afterwards, I loaded the script into
MeGUI and I chose one of the high quality 2-pass x264 presets. I gave it
a bitrate of 20,000 and encoded it. Surprisingly, it took less than 5
hours to complete and I don't have very good hardware. Just a dual core
AMD 6000 at 3ghz. The video part was completed, but now I had to figure
out what to do about those 6 audio files I downloaded.
Converting 6 Flac Audio Files to a
single 5.1 Flac Audio File
After doing some digging, I discovered that
the latest version of Audacity (Version 1.3.8 beta)
supports exporting to multichannel audio. Audacity is a free,
crossplatform audio editor / recorder. Believe it or not, it supports up
to 32 channels. To my dismay, it wasn't a very easy to understand way of
creating multichannel audio. I had to enable an obscure option in the
preferences of Audacity called "Use Custom Mix". Apparently, the makers
of Audacity can't make up there minds about how to enable multichannel
audio creation, their help file is outdated and unreliable, which is
forgivable considering Audacity is currently in beta. I dragged all of
the Flac files into audacity and to my surprise, it worked without error.
The Beta version of audacity has improved quite a bit from its stable
counterpart, supporting new input and output formats. I'm impressed!
I exported as a FLAC file and it came to a dialog box asking me to map
the tracks to channels. It didn't give me any hint as to which channels
the tracks belong to, all I had to go on was "Channel 1", "Channel 2",
etc. After doing a bit of research on the net, I discovered that 5.1
Channels must be mapped in this order: Left, Right, Center, LFE (Low
Frequency Effects), Left Surround and Right Surround. Luckily, the makers
of Elephants Dream were kind enough to neatly label each audio file with
the names of each channel. I mapped the channels accordingly and saved
it.
Merging Audio and Video Into
One
After creating the Flac file (which sounds amazing, mind you!), I had to
mux the audio and video back together. For this, I called upon MKVMerge,
which is included with MKVToolnix.
I ran the program and dropped the video and 5.1 Flac and saved the file.
The resulting filesize was round 1.55GB. Not bad. :)
It's amazing how much work went into creating Blu-Ray-like Quality using
only free software. I could have just bought the Blu Ray version of
Elephants Dream, which I still might do. They include extras that might
not be available on the internet. Regardless, with a little bit of
ingenuity and a lot of spare time, I figured it out. :)
I have uploaded the video to the internet for the world to see. To play
it, you will need a very FAST computer and perhaps CoreAVC along with a
FLAC decoder of some sort. I prefer MadFlac. VLC might be able to play
it, but trust me, CoreAVC and MadFlac is far more rewarding.
Download
Download Insane Quality (1.5GB) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or View
it in Lower Quality at Youtube
Download a Sample (100MB)
Required for Playback:
- Media
Player Classic lightweight WMP Alternative
- CoreAVC for video decoding
- MadFlac for audio decoding
or just install K-Lite Codec Pack (Does
not include CoreAVC. K-Lite comes with a slower (free) H.264 decoder)
Creative Commons License for Elephants
Dream
(c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation /
Netherlands Media Art Institute /
www.elephantsdream.org
Monday, 20 July 2009 06:23 | 
Written by Neil
A long time ago, I found this video on the
internet called Elephants
Dream. I didn't know what it was all about at the time, but I watched
it and I was interested to know more. I discovered that it was a
completely open short film made using entirely open source and free
software, which is an amazing feat. Their goal was to prove that it's
possible to make CG movies of similar depth and quality of those that hit
the big screen using only software that is completely free. They settled
on Blender for their 3d creation software and with a small team,
accomplished it with great results!
Comments
No it's not. Look at the title. They're .zip.001, .zip.002 and .zip.003.
The reason it won't extract is because filefront removed the extra file extension.
I didn't notice this until now. Amazing job filefront.
I guess if you still want to test whether or not the file is corrupt, just rename the parts to .zip.001, .zip.002, etc.
Hi Herojoker. I'm quite positive the zip files corrupted. You can blame Filefront.
I no longer have the multipart zips, I do have another version which I would be happy to upload if I can find a host that will allow a 1500MB filesize.
Until then, I'm out of ideas. :(
nice work. although, i could not extract zip files. it tells me that all zips are invalid. (7z, zipgenious)
any alternative source?
thanks