Capturing brush strokes to a movie

John,

I'm having some difficulty capturing a particular sequence of events to a new movie file. Could you help with some guidance on how to this, if it is possible, in SA?

I have a simple Paint Synth preset stored in a PASeq. It creates 200 brush strokes using a movie frame as source. For each frame of the source movie, I'd like to generate about 120 frames of a new movie by capturing new brush strokes to the canvas over several seconds, then advance to the next source frame once all the brush strokes are completed and repeat. After each source frame advance, the preset simply overwrites the current canvas with additional brush strokes based on the new frame.

I hope this description is clear. It's similar to automated rotoscoping with Process with PASeq>Source to Movie, but I need to record multiple movie frames as the PASeq builds the effect rather than capturing only the final effect.

I've tried various ways of using Stream, Source>Settings, and Loop Action, but to no avail. Hopefully, I'm overlooking something.

Thanks,

Michael

You'd use an open movie stream, with the Enable Gated AutoWrite movie stream write frame flag, with an appropriate AutoWrite rate (set in the movie tab in the main preferences dialog). So this will dump frame captures of the auto-painting canvas at the AutoWrite rate.

...

And set File : Source Settings : Movie Loop Action Advance menu flag on. This will advance the source movie for every cycle of the paint synth preset (or PASeq preset) running in loop action.

So when you start up loop action frames will be written out into the open movie stream. The time between frames being written out will be the AutoWrite rate. When the paint or paseq preset loops, then the source movie will advance.

...

The output movie stream will playback at the FPS set in the movie codec settings dialog. So the perceived speed of the painting will be due to the interaction of how frequently you autowrite frames into the movie stream, and the final fps it plays back at. You will need to juggle those timings to get the brush stroke paint rate in the final rendered movie to time out the way you want it to.

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Synthetik March 5, 2012 at 1:58pm

You'd use an open movie stream, with the Enable Gated AutoWrite movie stream write frame flag, with an appropriate AutoWrite rate (set in the movie tab in the main preferences dialog). So this will dump frame captures of the auto-painting canvas at the AutoWrite rate.

...

And set File : Source Settings : Movie Loop Action Advance menu flag on. This will advance the source movie for every cycle of the paint synth preset (or PASeq preset) running in loop action.

..

So when you start up loop action frames will be written out into the open movie stream. The time between frames being written out will be the AutoWrite rate. When the paint or paseq preset loops, then the source movie will advance.

...

The output movie stream will playback at the FPS set in the movie codec settings dialog. So the perceived speed of the painting will be due to the interaction of how frequently you autowrite frames into the movie stream, and the final fps it plays back at. You will need to juggle those timings to get the brush stroke paint rate in the final rendered movie to time out the way you want it to.
- Michael OBannon > Synthetik March 15, 2012 at 11:33am
  
  Thanks very much, John. This was very helpful, and it worked out nicely.

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