Paint Entire Frame Fast - HELP NEEDED!

[Michael]

Hi, Can anyone tell me a way to paint every pixel of a frame in a very quick manner using the Quick Oil preset? I'm working on a short film (4 min.) that was shot live-action and I'm now running it through SA 3.5 using a PASeq. My PASeq consists of three steps. Step one sets the background to the source image. Step is using the Quick Oil preset with a path start set to Border Clockwise Full in (but I don't let this step run long enough to paint the entire frame as it takes too long and still leaves some pixels unpainted.) Step three is using the Quick Oil with a Path start set to Clumpy Random. I let this run for a few minutes to paint the whole frame. My problem is that the last step in the PASeq leaves some pixels unpainted. These unpainted pixels cause flickering during playback of the movie. I have tried creating a PASeq that paints the entire frame as one step in PASeq using the Quick Oil preset with a Path Start set to Horizontal Grid Scan (which paints the entire frame, but takes forever) I've also tried a Quick Oil step in my PASeq using the inhibitor set to "White Only" (I think) but this still doesn't cover every single pixel of the frame with paint. Basically, I just need to lay to down a base coat of paint over the entire image using Quick Oil very quickly. The speed is important because I am rendering thousands of frames and of course I'm on a deadline. Thanks, Michael P.S. Has anyone ever successfully run multiple instances of SA 3.5 on their machines? It seems like this would be a fast way to render out a movie if you broke up the movie into multiple smaller movie files.

[Synthetik]

You can run multiple instances of studio artist if you wish. Depending on what you are doing and the number of cores in the machine this might be a good thing or not. Things like the vectorizer or some ip ops or msg processors will thread, so then you would probably run slower by running multiple instances of the program. For straight paint synth effects you might gain something if you have a lot of cores and can break up the processing. Some paint synth presets may be threading internally (image processing brush load for example).

Rather than starting with the source and then painting over it, have you tried doing that for the first frame only and then for the other frames just overpaint on your previous output frame. This will be much more successful in reducing flicker, and the fact that you may have missed few spots will help reduce flicker even more.

You can use the path start and path end settings to help speed up drawing of the complete frame. Using the blanking buffer is a good approach to this. In path start control panel, turn on 'reset blanking before action'. Set the Blanking popup to brush only. Set the Inhibitor to skip blanking. What these settings will do in insure that path start points always occur on a part of the canvas that has not been painted in this paint pass.

Then, you can set the path end blanking control on. this will insure that paths will stop drawing when they run into an area already drawn.

[liveart]

Flicker and speed of paint are actually two separate issues.

I read that you are on a deadline and so I will presume that you followed John's suggestions and are at least halfway done by now.

But if you are doing something like this again I would suggest building a Paseq out of ImOps. It will run faster. For effects like a generalized watercolor or oil paint look it is quite possible to use the Image operations of SA to create the effect. It will take a bit of tweeking to get it right for your particular source material. But once you have it, the Pas will run much quicker that an auto frame paint preset. I attached an example of how this can be done.

As for flicker there have been several discussions in the forum on how to reduce this. There is also some guidance on the subject in the SA help manual. I suggest a search of the forum and manual to learn these techniques for future efforts.


The pic below is a screen grab of a movie processed with the attached PAS. All ImOp no auto painting steps involved.

Oil4roto-.zip

[David Kaplan]

That still image looks good - I'd be curious to see the film in motion. Can you post part of it?