We received a request from a user to run through some of the sequential keyframe features as a new tutorial. Since he had used them several years ago in some projects, but had forgotten the specifics of working with this particular somewhat esoteric feature of Studio Artist.
Here's a tip that helps explain the basics of working with Sequential Keyframe recording.
Sequential keyframe recording is a way to help automate the workflow of building up hand drawn animation that is going to be keyframed. So rather than build up each individual frame in a hand drawn animation by drawing each one by hand, one frame at a time. You can instead work with a set of hand drawn keyframe images. So you hand draw each keyframe, using a series of hand drawn paint strokes that are recorded as individual action steps in a Paint Action Sequence. And then you can run one of the Action : Animate with a PASeq menu commands to automatically generate a complete hand drawn animated film. Where any frames in between your hand drawn keyframes are interpolated automatically by Studio Artist. This can be a huge time saver, as you might imagine. As opposed to the alternative of manually hand drawing every single frame in the hand drawn animated film.
Note, this is totally different than auto-rotoscoping, where you record a visual effect style desired for creating an animated movie by working with a single frame of the movie file, recording different Studio Artist automatic action visual effect commands into a PASeq, and then running one of the Action : Process Source Movie with a PASeq menu commands. That alternative approach to building animated films called auto-rotoscoping process automatically generates a paint animation. No manual drawing of all of the frames or of specific keyframes are required when working with automatic rotoscoping in Studio Artist. Although you could combine the 2 different approaches to building up paint animation together into a single PASeq if you wanted to.
I'll post some little examples of how you could use sequential keyframe recording tomorrow. They are uploading to vimeo, and i'm getting ready to call it a day. And there are some real simple ones in the tip.
So if you are clueless as to what we're talking about, check out the tip.
And if you have more questions about how it all works, feel free to ask.
And we're also going through this tutorial exercise here to see if there is anything we need to improve with this sequential keyframe recording feature available in V4 as we work to finish up the next release of Studio Artist. So feel free to speak up if you wonder why it doesn't do X or Y.
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Here's a simple little demo animation i did years ago using sequential keyframe recording to help me knock off the keyframe drawing quickly.
Simple Sequential Keyframe Example (Goatboy the cat) from john dalton on Vimeo.