Where is the best place to ask little tech/creative questions?

[David Kaplan]

does one do it here in this central forum space? or is the old DMN forum still the place to do it?

[keith Ingersoll]

Hey David,
I was hesitant but it seems we're the first..... kinda like arriving early to class. Whew am I glad Synthetik supplied the 3 disc tutorials. I am just putting my brain around the concept of a synthesizer for art. The abilities of this soft ware is staggering. I have been having trouble getting video into AS for painting. Some work some don't. Mov files vs. Avi have anything to do with this? How many frames maximum?

[Synthetik]

Studio Artist doesn't support avi files, you'd need to convert them to quicktime. I found something online a while ago that does the conversion. I can post some info on this if people are interested.

As far as max frames, if you are processing the only limitation is enough disc space for the output frames. IF you are loading a movie in the canvas, then if your canvas movie preferences are set to ram movie the whole thing gets loaded into ram, so you want to have a lot. after it runs out it starts using virtual memory for the movie load and that gets really slow. for long movies as canvas movies i would suggest using the disk movie option to avoid this.

[keith Ingersoll]

How can I preserve the sound track of imported quicktime movies? Is the disk movie option on one of the supplied tutorials? Is there an auto save function in AS?
I have an imac with 2 gigs of virtual memory and a 250 gig HD. I like to process iClone movies.

[Synthetik]

The tutorials on disc #2 talk about the difference between processing movies with PASeqs (Paint Action Sequence) vs loading a movie to the canvas (which you would typically do less frequently for things like hand drawn animation or hand painting over frames). The normal 'process a movie with a PASeq to a movie' kind of movie rendering works a frame at a time.

There is not an auto save function.

Studio Artist does not pass through the sound in your source movie to the processed output movie. You can copy and past the audio track in the nonlinear video editor of your choice. Be aware that you can configure Studio Artist to change the frame rate of your processed movie, which would lead to sound synch issues if you choose one of those options.

[keith Ingersoll]

Thank you for your timely reply. The supplied tutorials are good as well as the web site's choices of support. But, the big butt, using this forum provides feedback in a way you can't get otherwise. It's personalized!

[Synthetik]

Ok, i fixed the audio issue for you. In the next update of 3.5 you will be able to pass through your source audio when processing or building movie stream animation.

My previous comments about losing synch if you modify the frame rate still apply.

[Mitch Cohen]

Three cheers for pass-through audio! Hooray!

[craig deeley]

I have not been able to access the DMN forum for months. I get redirected to the Apache home page - even tho the URL points to the forum address. This happens with all browsers and all attempts to clear caches and so forth. I use all the major Mac browsers Safari/Firefox/Mozilla-based/Opera and more to test performance of my companies products. Usually I can figure it out - but I have given up.
I would rather see some discussion here... As I can actually see these pages.

Craig

[Synthetik]

Well, to be honest i started this new forum out of frustration after being unable to log onto the old DMN forum for several days. And a lot of customers had been bugging us for awhile to develop a better forum alternative. So by all means feel free to ask questions here, that was one of the intentions for the forum here.

The old DMN forum still exists and we still monitor it, so you're more than welcome to continue posting there as well. OR you can post in both places and see what kind of responses you get.

My guess is that over time people might tend to migrate to this newer forum since it offers a bunch of more modern features and sees to be more reliable as far as access, but we're certainly not pushing people to stop using the older one. It's perhaps a little easier to track forum posts on DMN, but we might be able to offer suggestions for improvements here if we can figure out what they would be.