Hello,
I'm not an artist but I like creating images so i was attracted to SA (v. 4.05, Windows 7)
I acquired SA a couple of weeks ago and have been looking at the videos (most of them), reading the manual (some of it), reading the "tips" posts (some of them).
Of course, I'm having the "new software: what's going on?" experience and frustrations, as well has some gee-whiz moments as I see what SA can do.
An issue:
I can get the Evolution function to work and generate images -- very neat -- but the Advanced Evolution editor just does not work as I'm seeing in the documentation. I can get an image into one of those little white boxes along the top, but nothing I do gets past that point.
Related question: Can any image on the canvas be moved to the Evolution window to be tinkered with by that engine?
A request:
If the "dancing girl" had a complex background that was:
a) static, or:
b) contained moving elements
could she still be auto-rotoscoped (is that a word?) as simply as in the tutorial video? If not (as I expect), how can the background of a moving subject be removed?
Does anyone know of a "How to get SA to do stuff" kind of book or website (other than this one)?
That's it for now. Thanks for listening.
Cheers,
Robert
Replies
Regarding the MSG Advanced Editor and PASeq editor on windows. It's possible to pull the controls of both editors all the way to the right, where they are hidden from view. Its sounds like this is what you are experiencing. It's easy to fix. Just go to the very right side of the editor, and mouse down on the vertical splitter control there, and pull it left. The contents of the editor will pull into view.
Here's a help tip that discusses this.
The dancing girl movie is on a flat colored background. So presets that work off of edges are going to highlight the moving girl and not draw in the flat colored background areas.
Those presets would draw any background edge detail that was present if the background was busy and not flat colored. That's not necessarily a problem, it all depends on what you are trying to do in your paint animation.
Here's a link to some tips on movie processing. The paint animation strategies series discusses different approaches to building PASeqs for movie processing.
There's also a number of effect blog posts on movie processing here.