Rotoscoping Help

[Brendan Ward]

Im a new Studio Artist user and plan on using it for rotoscoping short films. I went through the tutorials on rotoscoping and understand the basic idea of applying the desired effects to a single frame and then letting the program auto-rotoscope the others. I have edited my films in iMovie and and converted/compressed the file to a .mov format so that I can rotoscope the entire film as opposed to breaking it down into scenes... How do I go about rotoscoping frame by frame? Is there a way to apply my PASeq to only certain groups of frames as opposed to the entire film? Is it possible to speed up the auto-rotoscoping proccess? ...any other tips or info would be great as I'm sure I've overlooked several features, thanks!

[Synthetik]

You should watch the tutorial movies on tutorial disc # associated with recording a Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) and the processing a movie file with a PASeq.

The basic idea is that you record into a PASeq the various operations you want to perform on your movie file while working with a single frame of the movie file. You then run the Action : Process a movie file with a paint action sequence : to a movie file menu command. This command asks your for the source movie to process, lets you set the size of the output movie, and then names the output movie, and then process the input movie frame by frame.

Starting in 3.5.2 there is also an additional menu option under Action that lets your process the loaded source movie to a movie, this is a shortcut menu that saves you the 2 steps of selecting the source movie and setting the canvas size.

The easiest way to only process certain frames is to just output the part you want to process from your nonlinear editor, process that subsection, and then paste the processed output into the appropriate place in the overall sequence. You could do this using the quicktime player pro, or since you are using imovie you could do it there.

You can mark in and out points associated with your loaded source movie, so that is also a way, but that will not work with the process menu, so you'd have to use a movie stream for output if you were using the source area in/out checkboxes.

It helps to be smart when building your PASeq, keeping in mind that you would like it to run quickly on a single frame since that time multiplied by the overall number of frames is how long it will take to process the movie. Don't make a PASeq that takes 5 minutes to run unless you really want it to do that for some reason.

Most hand drawn animation is generated at 10 to 15 frames per second. So one trick is to do this with your processed movie file as well since it cuts down on the number of frames to process and will also give you something that looks more like real animation visually. you an skip frames in your source movie by setting up the appropriate control in the Process Setting dialog, located under the main Action menu. This is also where you specify timing options, alpha channel option, etc.

I always point people getting started to the Process Movies tutorial pdf located in the studio artist 3.5 documentation folder. This short tutorial runs you through a number of simple PASeq's and explains why they were constructed the way they were. We also provide the PASeqs as PASeq presets, so you can try these out or edit them as an aid to getting started processing movies in Studio Artist.

[David Kaplan]

one of the few disadvantages of starting a new forum for SA users is that we don't have here the collective knowledge base of all those many years worth of questions, answers and posts that accumulated on the older DMN forum -- but it's still there!

http://www.synthetik.com/Links/Forums.html

i would recommend checking it out for some of the more basic/newbie questions because there really is a WEALTH of knowledge to be found. (of course, it's good to check here as well because there are new features on the latest versions of the program which may not be addressed there.)