Manual Rotoscoping

[Brendan Ward]

Ive been trying to play around with some manual rotoscoping but am having some problems...first off i just want to make sure im going about doing it correctly... I open up the program and load my movie as the source image...i then load the same movie to the canvas where i can edit the movie one frame at a time. i understand that i have to hit the record button when im finished editing each frame before going to the next frame and then save the entire movie under file-save canvas movie.... so i have a few questions assuming the above process i described is correct... 1) After i edit a slide, hit the record button and then go to the next slide, if i go back to the edited slide, it has reverted to the original. Is this how its supposed to work and if so, is there a way i can view the slides with my editing still applied? 2) the 'record' button somtimes gives me an error window and im pretty sure its a RAM problem...i know i can change the canvas movie memory settings from RAM to Disk.....whats the difference? 3) after i edit the entire movie and save it, how do i veiw the movie with the effects? yes i know...im a 'newb'.....basically i want to run the program like Rob Sabiston's 'rotoshop' where i can flip back and forth between frames, manually editing and saving them as I go.....any other tips or advice would be sweeeet...thanks.

[Donna Kuhn]

i'm somewhat of a newb myself but when i have made movies this way it seems that even though you keep seeing your original source when you proceed to the next frame you don't see that in the finished movie.
after you save the movie you select "load movie to canvas" and your edited movie will play as the loaded canvas movie. i also like to manually rotoscope using a movie stream, it seems to have a little more flexibility and you don't have to record after each step. i don't know what rotoshop is but i'm going to look it up right now.

[Synthetik]

I've never tried opening the same movie in the source area and as an open canvas movie. I'm not sure why you would want to do it but i guess there might be some applications. If you did that the source area would not see any changes you made to the canvas movie until you actually saved them to the file.

If you just want to paint or otherwise manipulate individual frames in the movie you can just load it as a canvas movie and work with individual frames.

The difference between ram and disk canvas movies is that for the ram option it tries to load the entire movie into ram. At the dawn of time this was a useful thing since the computers could not playback movies from disk very well, especially uncompressed ones. On fast modern machines it is less of an issue. The bad thing about ram movies is that they chew up extreme amounts of memory and you can quickly end up trashing virtual memory or even running out.

Disk canvas movies playback from disk, so they do not try to buffer the entire movie in ram. I tend to use disk movies most of the time these days, and always if i have more than a small amount of frames in my movie file.

With a loaded canvas movie, you can view any of your edits by playing the movie back with the canvas transport controls, or by single stepping through the frames. once you unload the canvas movie you can look at it in the quicktime player or any other application including studio artist that plays back quicktime movies.

The tutorial movies on disk #2 run you through all the different ways to work with movies in studio artist, those tutorial movies are worth watching when you are getting started. You can process movies with a paint action sequence. You can open a movie stream and dump frames to the open stream. OR you can load a movie into the canvas and work with the individual frames there. All of these different options are useful for different tasks.

If your goal is to apply studio artist effects automatically to a movie, then processing with a PASeq is typically the way to go. Movie Streams are useful for when you want to generate a movie on the fly of studio artist drawing (or you manually drawing or warping) in real time. OR, if you want to build keyframe animation. The canvas movie is useful if you want to hand paint on individual frames or otherwise manipulate them and watch the results playback while you are working.