#Video Post Problem
11 messages in this thread
Hi
I have a 640×480 FLC animation of a bungee jumping caveman (45 frames). The
screen starts of completely black then the caveman appears at about frame 5 at
the top of the screen, falls to the bottom, waves his arms then flies back up
off the screen. The original animator used a fade out in the top inch of the
screen so that the caveman appears very faint between frames 5-10.
I have been asked to underlay a jungle scene bitmap. If I try and use alpha
channel on the animation so that all the black is removed, the faded bit in the
top inch of the animation makes the caveman transparent on the black pixels.
Do you know of any methods I should use to make the faded out bit not to
interfere with the alpha channel ?
I have 3DS v4
The animation ONLY, of the caveman
Paint shop pro
VFD
And the jungle bitmap.
Thanks for any help.
Geoff Coope
Geoff,
You will first need to generate sequential bitmaps from your flic. (I'm not
sure what formats PSP likes, but tga's would probably be best.)
You can quick'n'easy make the sequential bitmaps by just loading the flic as a
background in 3DS, set all your options and click the render button. No lights,
no cameras, no objects. Doesn't even matter which viewport you use. I'd also
strongly recommend turning Gamma off, so you don't wash out the colors in the
flic.
After you've got your sequential bitmaps, make a sequence of masks. You want
the pixels where the caveman is all white. Where the jungle is should be all
black, as it sounds like it is anyway. In PSP, just use your lasso and select
all of the caveman. Then fountain fill white. Save under a different name (you
could call it MASK0000.*). Then do the same with the second frame, calling it
for example MASK0001.*, etc. If there are any beginning/ending frames with no
caveman, include them in your numerical sequence so you wind up with as many
frames for your mask sequence as there are for the flic. Load the jungle, then
the original bitmaps as a second Video Post entry with the mask frames in the
mask slot in the alpha dialog and you're off & running. You can specify a
sequence of bitmaps using the * (for example, MASK*.tga will, in turn, load
MASK0000, MASK0001, MASK0002 etc. as long as there aren't any missing numbers
in the sequence.)
Hope this helps,
SCL
Thanks Stephen,
I better get the coffee in 🙂
Hope you have by now discovered it's not as bad as it sounds…
My own guesstimate of how long it'd take was two, maybe three hours, depending
on how adept at PSP you are…
Hope it came out fine!
SCL
Hi Stephen,
It took about 4hrs to complete. (45 frames worth of magic wand and fine
editing). I used Micrographics Photomagic which proved excelent at the magic
wand.
I have another question 🙂
Would it be possible to render a scene using anti-aliasing on a blue solid
background then completely remove the blue background from the final animation.
This is for programming sprite based animations which the animations fit
perfectly with aliased edges onto a custom blue background ?
Hope that makes some sense to you.
Geoff
Geoff,
Glad it worked out for you.
Your new question makes perfect sense. If whatever you're using to move the
sprites around supports alpha channels, you're home free.
If it doesn't, you're getting into chroma keying (about which whole books could
be and probably have been written), and you're going to have problems with the
anti-aliased edges, although a real close match to your final background can
make this look pretty seamless.
One technique might be to render each image twice, once with antialiasing and
once without. You can use the antialiased image, and the non-antialiased
background as a mask, to eliminate the outline effect. Of course you'll lose
antialiasing with the background, but this is one of those cases where you're
gonna give up something no matter what — it's basically a question of arriving
at an acceptable set of compromises.
I'm probably not the best person to discuss the finer points of chroma key, so
if that's the route you're going, you might get better answers from
AniPro/Studio people, or some of the 2D animation forums in the Graphics
Information area.
But of course I'll be happy to answer anything I can. Hope this helps, at
least a little.
SCL
Chroma keying !! Sounds intresting.
I'll have a look into it.
Thanks for the response.
Guess What…. I have another question 🙂
I am trying to get the boss to buy animator pro, which to my distress he won't.
Do you know of any good reasons to have animator/studio pro as a additional
tool to 3DS ?
Thanks for responding to all my messages.
Geoff
Hi Geoff.
You gotta get Ani Pro, if for no other reason than it allows you great control
over editing and compositing flics. Plus, it's a great tool for making maps.
Matthew Samia
Thanks, Thats what I need.
Geoff
Well, for one thing right off, AniPro will easily do the chroma keying for that
project you were asking about (8-bit color). Animator Studio will do much the
same thing, but with 24-bit color.
SCL
Thanks
Geoff