Noob here again.
I'm working on hand painting bits of a movie - see movie tests here: http://www.insomn1ac.com/TestsSneakPeeks.html
am reading everything I can in tips but not clear on just how to paint frames.
no problems with the actual painting, but how do I play back to see how it looks? I'm dragging each frame to the work area. do I need to save each frame....as....? do they stay in order?
is it best to create a movie layer to paint on? want as small a file as possible.
thanks so much for any suggestions and info.
- BC
Replies
In looking at your movie tests, it seems like the PASeq approach is the way to go, unless i'm misinterpreting what you are doing.
Here's a different scenario:
If you are doing totally manually drawn animation. Or if you are doing something like hand painting on top of existing video frames. Then you could work manually with movie layers. Basically a movie layer lets you load an entire movie into a layer. You can then hand paint on individual frames, and playback the edited movie, and then save the edited movie. So hand painting a mustache on a persons face in each individual movie frame is perhaps a stupid example of this kind of hand drawn animation.
So it really depends on what you are trying to achieve as to which approach you are going to take. Most of the video examples you see posted here on the forum were done by recording a PASeq and processing a movie file with the PASeq. Here's an example of what i mean by this kind of movie processing to generate paint animation effects.
I've posted one example below that is a short clip from Richard Hoffman's award winning film Invisible Mountain that shows off a creative use of hand painting with movie layers. As you can see, it's a very different kind of paint animation. Sharon Katz's animation work is another example of hand painting with movie layers to build up paint animation.
Here's a tip on the mechanics of processing a movie with an image operation effect.
Here's a tip on building more sophesticated PASeq processing strategies for processing movie files with paint animation effects.
Here's a tip on working with movie layers.
IMclip5.mov
Uncompressed video output is great for generating your work, because there is no distortion of the individual frame image quality by the video compression codec. So it's very good for archiving an animation, and for using as a source for some destination copy that is lossy compressed. I usually use animation codec for my PASeq movie processing renders, since it's lossless compression, which is what i want for my archived processed output (ie the highest quality).
Now for web display or emailing to someone you want something that is a lot smaller than the large file sizes uncompressed video formats take up. H264 codec works great for this, and is what i typically use. You can use Quicktime Player Pro to quickly convert an uncompressed video file into a H264 compressed copy, you just use the export menu option. Quicktime supports lots of different export output formats.
wondering if processing in 256 colors would give me an interesting alternative to million colors. will do a test.
I use H264 for Youtube and web. I like what you say about archiving to have best quality - like raw footage for film and phtos.
final product is for film festivals so it should look nice on a large screen in HD. but, details are not as important as an overall visual journey rather like a focused Rorschach (sp?) test. the song is bare and spare as well. audiences usually look at my vids over and over, so I'm not going for lush or details here. I like the HUH? factor. should look brushpainting/woodblock - organic.
need to have a good Youtube copy under 2G since that's where my audience is. easy to get big files, but how I'll get it scrunched down enough I dunno.
so, put in entire sequence I want to paint as movie file. (need to go back and read that on the tips page again) then pull frames one at a time to paint? and preview?
Because the edits are modifying the loaded movie int he movie layer, it's always a good idea to first make a copy of your original source movie and then load the copy into the movie layer for your work. That way your original footage is untouched.
In general it's a good idea to Save a flattened movie from your movie layer after you are done painting. What this does is output a copy of the movie being used in the movie layer where all of the frames are re-compressed. So the flattened movie doesn't have any video track edits in this, just a single video track that references a sequential series of media frames.
aha! that's what "rec" is for.
so, this will be like calligraphy on a long sheet of rice paper. once saved. it's a done deal. no preveiw?
I read about flattening. so that will save to QT and be editable in Premiere (or whatever) so keyframes, etc will match the rest of the video.
is there any difference visually between the painted flattened frames and unpainted unflattened ones? um...I guess I'll find that out.
thanks so much for being very supportive of your program.
I think I have a general idea of what to do. now it's a matter of finding the right "look" through experimentation -and lots of repetition.
- BC
You do bring up a good point about preview. You can preview the movie by playing it after making an edit. But frame changes are also undoable events in the canvas, so undoing the edit, playing again, and then redoing the edit is problematic. So i'll think about how we could better deal with that particular workflow issue.