Simultaneous actions?

[Florence Artur]

One thing I have been dreaming about since I started doing animation in SA is the possibility of doing several things simultaneously: for instance, starting a paseq and then drawing on the canvas while the paseq is still running, or having 2 paseqs running at the same time. I was hoping that SA4 could get me closer to this, but I have no idea how. I'm not even sure that's a realistic wish, lol. The workaround I've been using so far is to record the two actions on two different movies, the top one with an alpha channel for compositing. It works but it has its limitations: it's not very intuitive, and the two actions cannot interact. Any better ideas? Thank you Florence

[liveart]

SA v4 does get you closer. play around with the dual mode. Then try dual mode in loop action and use the stylus to adjust the secondary operation.

the ultimate dream of drawing on top of a movie and having the paint interact with the movie is still just out of reach.... until John surprises us again.

[Florence Artur]

"the ultimate dream of drawing on top of a movie and having the paint interact with the movie is still just out of reach..."

Wouldn't that be nice though...

I did try the dual mode but didn't feel very comfortable with it. I'll keep playing with it. The sample presets look cool. I hope there will be more later. I'm much better at using presets than at making them :-)

[liveart]

Florence

To make a dual mode action all you need to do is choose the paint preset you want, then choose the secondary operation .. either a ImOp or a Warp is a good place to start.

Try scale proportional for a start. With your paint preset selected head to the warp editor, select scale proportional, pen down on the canvas to make a small adjustment with the warp. Then head to dual mode. In the dual mode editor make sure that warp is selected for the "Dual Op".

Now you can draw on the canvas and 2 things will happen at once.. the paint will draw and the canvas will scale.

Now for more fun hit cmd-Shift-r. This runs a loop command. The paint preset you selected will paint in auto mode and the warp will be adjustable interactively... pretty cool stuff. Have fun.

[Synthetik]

Dual Mode paint does provide a way to do some of the things you want, like painting on the canvas while an image processing effect is running on it at the same time. The factory presets we currently provide for dual mode paint barely begin to scratch the surface of what is possible with this new Studio Artist 4 operation mode. When i can free up some spare time i'll try to build some additional example presets, and hopefully other early users of v4 will post some presets to share.

As to painting on a playing movie, i guess i'm going to ask the question i always ask when someone talks about this, which is how to you envision this working (and please provide a very detailed answer). Because when you start thinking about it there's a number of different questions that come up.

Let's say you are drawing a single paint path. Now should the entire path persist as new video frames come into place over time? Or is just the current nib location painting on the current frame and the older parts of the painted path are not persisting?

When you say you want the movie to interact with the movie, what kind of interaction are you thinking of?

[Florence Artur]

Oh yes, I can imagine there would be endless questions, either without answer or a different answer for everyone. Also, there would be problems with the playback speed and lost frames, but maybe that's not the main obstacle.

I need to play more with the dual mode as I said. The reason I didn't feel very comfortable is that it uses functionalities that I don't use. I do use image operations but rarely, and MSG is totally beyond me, at least until I can find a tutorial to get me started.

I've been reading the SA4 documentation and noticed that much of it seems to be based on or inspired by the way music synthesizers work. I suppose that's why I've always felt so baffled and frustrated by it, lol.

Anyway, is there a chance that the dual mode will some day also handle paseqs? Or does it already?

[Synthetik]

Right now it handles a single image processing effect. Which could be an image operation, texture synthesizer, MSG, or warp effect. So it doesn't let you choose a paseq right now. There are some issues associated with that so i don't know if that would happen. But we could potentially add a second image operation option that could be a second choice of the above image processing options.

[Florence Artur]

OK, well, I'll just have to wait and see what comes up :-D

[Synthetik]

It is true that musicians seem to take to the Studio Artist design like a duck to water. Probably because the music synthesizer analogies we use make total sense to them and seem very natural.

When you say you want to use a PASeq in dual mode, is this because you want a second paint preset to be running at the same time?

[Florence Artur]

Yes, or the same preset but on a different path.

I'd like more than one thing to happen on the screen at the same time. For instance, draw a line in one corner, and before it's finished start drawing another, so that for a while both actions are happening simultaneously.

I tried to do this with paseqs, but it seems that if I start running a new paseq it stops the one already running, is that right?