Basics
Here we are going to cover some of the basic settings you need to know to create your first animation.
There is a lot to know in Deforum but we are going to break it down to easier steps.
First I am going to show you the “Express Way” for a beginner to get some good looking animations.
Before connecting to Colab, I highly recommend to first insert your settings.
Scroll down untill you find these settings.
-Set animation_mode to 3D; for now, we are going to focus on this mode.
-Set max_frames to 60; this determinates after how many frames Deforum is gonna stop to render. Because we are going to render in 12 frames per second (fps), 60 frames is going to be 5 second of rendering ( 5sec x 12frames = 60frames).
-Set border to warp; this is going to help the borders of the screen of your animation to look much better.
Moving on to the next settings: Motion Parameters.
With these settings we are going to controll the camera movement
Imagine as if your render is what the camera is looking at and it’s moving in a three dimensional space.
W x H: Is the resolution of your render in pixels. when you want to increase or decrease always do it by 64 pixels at the time
For example:
(512-64=448); (512+64+64+64+64=768). This will give you an 16:9 ar.
Proper values: 128, 192, 256, 320, 384, 448, 512, 576, 640, 704, 768, 832, 896, 960, 1024.
Bit depth output: Is gonna increase the quality of your render but slower it as well.
Seed: Is the “license plate” of your animation. Like in img2img generation, is used to replicate an image. A value of -1 is gonna give you a random seed. You can also write your custom seed (EX: 123123). this is higly raccommended when testing new stuff.
Sampler: is the method the frames are generated with. For a beginner user I highly recommend to use the Euler or Euler_Ancestral, as they are faster
Steps: is strongly related to the quality of you will generate. Higher values generally means better details, lighting, depth. Generally is wise to set a value of 50 to test your prompt and settings, then higher this value around 90 up to 160.
KEEP IN MIND that steps value is divided by the coherence value. So if you set the coherence value higher, you also need to higher your steps value.
Scale: is how much stable diffusion is going to listen to your prompt. too high values can result in artifacts, too low in not so interesting colors and results. Good values are between 7 and 12.
This is a brief overview of these settings. We will discuss them in more detail in later sections.
Next scroll down to this setting. This is where you are going to insert the name of the folder where your frames and animation will be stored in your google drive.
Next scroll down untill you see this settings and change them to what you see in the second image
TRANSLATION X: 1
TRANSLATION X: 5
TRANSLATION Y: 1
TRANSLATION Y: 5
TRANSLATION Z: 1
ROTATION_X : makes the camera rotate on 360* circle going up or down (x axsis)
ROTATION_Y : makes the camera rotate on 360* circle going left or right (x axsis)
ROTATION_Z : makes the camera rotate on itself going left or right (x axsis)
TRANSLATION Z: 5
ROTATION X: 1
ROTATION X: 5
ROTATION Y: 1
ROTATION Y: 5
ROTATION Z: 5
ROTATION Z: 1
* To move in the opposite direction as showed in the examples, simply set them to a negative value *
For example:
To rotate the camera on itself right to left while is moving outward, we should set the TRANSLATION Z to -1 and the ROTATION Z to -0.6
KEEP IN MIND:
-Do not go to high with these values (for a beginner, values between -3 and 3 are good to start with).
-Rotation values are more sensible than translation values (for a beginner, values between -1.5 and 1.5 are good to start with).
TRANSLATION_X : makes the camera move left or right (x axsis)
TRANSLATION Y: makes the camera move up or down (y axsis)
TRANSLATION Z: makes the camera move inward or outward (z axsis)
scroll down untill you find the Coherence settings and change the Diffusion_cadence to a value of 2
(2 and 4 are generally good values)
This is very important for 2 reasons:
It will change the look of your animation by rendering the number set before of frames in the same moment, resulting in more coherent renders and it helps to kill that “classic giffy” look of AI animation.
It will significantly decrease your rendering time.
For this example I will set it to 2, but feel free to experiment with this value.
Values between 4 and 8 are good for animation with not a much camera movement
(I highly encourage you to experiment with this parameter later on, once you get the basics)
Next scroll down untill you find the prompt settings.
We are going to focus on the second block “animation_prompts”. You can ignore the first block for now.
Delete the default prompt and insert yours.
Make sure that in the beginning of the block there is this bracket { and this } in the end as shown in the image
Make sure to write your prompt between two quotes “ your prompt, 8k, cinematic “
Make sure to the number of frames where you want your prompt to start. Make sure to do it like this 0: “your prompt, 8k, cinematic“,
Make sure to put a comma in the end of your prompt before moving to the next one
Pay attention to this part! one small comma or bracket out of place and it will not work.
Here’s a prompt I built:
0:"intricate photorealistic epic portrait of a Dark Soul's knight, combine baroque art with photorealism, cinematography by Matt Reeves + Peter Craig + Greig Fraser, fire, vivid colors, GODRAYS!!!, crespuscolar rays, sunlight, dust particles, realistic lighting, volumetric lighting, dark cinematic, trending on artstation, 16k"
IMAGE 1 (DEFAULT)
IMAGE 2 (EDIT)
USE “/” TO CREATE A SUBFOLDER
name your folder example then put a “/”. whatever you write after the “/” is going to be the name of your subfolder.
In this case folder1
this is a little trick to keep things organized. You can create as many subfolders you want
FINALLY
Connect to Google Colab, select your model and run the cells!
CREATE YOUR VIDEO
In this video I will give you an introduction on how the steps setting works:
In the folder in your google drive you will find a settings file, as well with the frames named in numerical order
Open it to see all your settings and find your seed
FIND YOUR VIDEO, SETTINGS AND FRAMES
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Prompt and settings
(the way this section looks like could change with updates, but the functionalities are the same)
You can select any model also if you don’t have them in your Google Drive, as Deforum can download and store them on your colab session
Feel free to test all the recent models later on, but for this example i am going to use the 1.5 version