DPaint Video-ing
6 messages in this thread
A local animator came to me with a problem… He's using DPaint III to
produce an opening logo for a video he's doing. He wants it to look as
smooth and hi-res as possible. One version of the animation was done in 16
color hi-res overscan. It's about 700 frames. On my 28 Mhz '030, it still
has trouble blitting frame to frame, and it looks jerky, and speeds up and
slows down depending on how much information is being blitted around. He's
also tried reducing the number of colors, and that helps somewhat. Does
anyone have any good advice about getting the best results in this
situatioA few facts come to mind… One, the blitter can't keep up.
There's not much you can do about that. Two, high contrast between white
letters and a star-field background will over-emphasize any jerkiness
caused by relatively large displacements of letters, frame to frame.
Three, a BCD-5000 and a single-frame deck would solve the problem. 🙂
John,
he should use a utility that allows him to remap the whole anim to a new
color palette. His goal should be to minimize the number of bits being
modified from one frame to the next. For example, if most of the movement
is due to large white letters on a (mostly) black background, and the
background is color 0 while the white is color 15, each pixel that changes
will go from 0000 to 1111 — mucho work for the computer. If he remaps the
white to color 1, only 1 bit will need to be changed for each pixel.
Mind you I'm new in the Amiga field, so this could be pure fantasy. But
I've read similar advice in magazines and it does make sense. Try shuffling
the color palette through a few combinations and see if the remapped anims
change significantly in size.
Blaq! – via Whap!
That is a great suggestion. Something like Butcher or PixMate would do
nicely to count the colors, and ADPro could automatically remap all of
them. Excellent thought. –jp–seattle–
John,
please tell me what results you get from remapping the anim.
Blaq! – via Whap!
When faces with similar problems, I have broken the animation down into two
sections – the motion section and the still section (maybe with still
moving stars background). I'd render it all in the highest res (in this
case hires/lace); and then use ADPro to bump the motion frames down to
lores-interlace (or even non-interlace at times, actually).
I then use PageFlipper PF/X to put the two together seamlessly, but even
ShowAnim can do that now. The motion mostly hides the lores version lack
of detail during the motion section, and I have a final title with hires
clarity for the still frames. Has worked pretty well for me. [using
InterFont 3D fonts, BTW 🙂 ] –jp–seattle–
John, I have read in several magazines that if you convert a hi-res anim to
HAM it actually runs faster. I haven't tried this myself yet so can't say
first hand. 700 frames is alot to convert and reassemble. Let us know what
you do.
Robert