Teaching Yourself Animation-The Tools Part 4

[Paul Perlow]

I thought you might be interested in reading this....

http://www.awn.com/blog/teaching-yourself-animation-tools-part-4

[Synthetik]

Thanks for passing this on. Sharon Katz is one of our Studio Artist beta testers, and has used Studio Artist for creating many of her award winning hand animated films.

She's one of the few people who gets into the whole set of movie layer features contained in Studio Artist. As opposed to auto-roroscoping off of a source movie, which is how your typical Studio Artist user deals with building animation, off of an existing video file by processing it with a PASeq.

Sharon used movie layers and their associated features to buid up traditional hand painted animation by doing it frame by frame. The old fashioned way. And some of the more advanced onion skin features we provide are in there because she specifically asked for them to do the kind of traditional animation work she likes to do using Studio Artist.

[liveart]

An onion skin that could show 3 frames back and 3 frames forward might be a nice feature. Maybe with a user adjustable percentage of opacity - so if one wanted the third frame back might be the least opaque up to the current frame then the forward frames might also "fade."

[Synthetik]

You can space them 3 frames apart if you want to. Do you mean allowing for N frames on either side?

[liveart]

yes

[Synthetik]

I can look at that.

Although i have to say that we are taking a hard look at the whole movie layer thing for the future. Especially in terms of how many customers actually use it.

And also how to deal with it technically under the hood, since apple is going out of their way to cut us (and everyone else) off a the knees for providing cross platform video editing support.

Quicktime was a thing of beauty, and could easily have been kept developed into the future, but it's a dead end api at this point. And movie layers make really heavy use of it. In V5 we abstracted all of that underlying stuff, so we could slide in other things instead under the hood to replace Quicktime. What those other things are or could be is an intense discussion here. Maybe just individual frame images in a folder would be one really useful option for movie layers.

But i do wonder how many people actually use movie layers, and use Studio Artist to build up animation the old fashioned way. By hand, frame by frame. I've always loved that we provide it as one of our many options for working with movies, and we are probably one of the only programs still around that really supports it these days.

For example, do you ever use any of those features in your own personal work? It seems like you use movie streams or action commands for everything you do. But maybe i have a misconception when i say that? I'm very curious, because we do need to work through how to best use our limited time in a way that benefits the most users.

Beefing up the ability to work with keyframing motion in the PASeq timeline and have it directly built up a movie layer might be one way to make this kind of old school approach much more usable and interesting for a wider range of potential people.