Logichaos

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!

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

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Quest for Super High Quality Elephants Dream

Split Videos into Multiple MKV Files (Without Quality Loss)