Whether you require 3D renders of your products, architectural visualisations or an animation to bring your product to life. If you are deciding between stills or an animation, you should be trying to maximise your ROI and get both.
Stills / CGIs / 3D Renders
Stills or animation? Either way, having high resolution CGI stills can be a great marketing asset for use on websites, printed materials or exhibition designs. Creating the stills at high resolution allows the image to be easily cropped while keeping the quality high.
In most cases, once your animation has been produced, it is relatively simple to adapt this to create high resolution stills.
Video
If your project only consists of still 3D renders, the cost to animate may not be as much as you think. In most cases, once the product, lighting rig and materials have been setup for a still image the process to animate, render and edit can be straight forward.
If they say an image is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth?!
Socials
Videos are key to engaging with your audience on social networks. You need to ensure your animation works best on all platforms. Most animations are created in a 16:9 aspect to match screen and TV sizes. When these are posted on Instagram, the video can become cropped or is small in comparison to normal image posts. The same applies to Facebook and Twitter. Most platforms prefer a 1:1 or a portrait aspect ratio.
You can tackle this in 2 ways.
- Safe Frames
The more cost-effective way – setting a central square safe frame at the start of production means you can keep the main focus and any titles and labels within this frame. When posting the animation on social media, you’ll be safe knowing that the platform will not crop off any important information. - Multiple Aspects
This creates multiple aspect ratio versions of the same animation. Producing it this way is more time consuming but has a better end result, meaning content is displayed as intended.
The more content the better…
Splitting your animations up into smaller segments enables you to post snippets of the video rather than the full animation time and time again.
Altering CGI stills is a great way to add to your ‘war chest’ of content. Unique images can be created by cropping in to the image or changing the background colour. A change of angle takes more time but can offer the audience another view of the subject and can help the engagement of the post.