#Can U chop off my flic?
7 messages in this thread
Hi everybody!
I hope somebody out there holds the answer for this one.
>> Here is my problem:
I have a flic that has to be light enough to be played from a double speed
CD-Rom drive. Its size is 628 x 311 pixels and it seems to be too heavy on its
original size.
My plan is to render only the small section of the screen where the action
really happens. In fact, most of the remaining screen stays the same. The
small flic would then be played on top of a 628 x 311 bitmap background, which
matches the first frame of the animation.
I have tryed creating a matte image in photoshop that isolates the area of the
screen where the action happens. I then used this black/white "window" to look
at my flic using Queue Alpha Channel from Video Post. The result was somehow
satisfactory, although I still have a large and unwanted white frame around the
flic which maintains its original resolution of 628 x 311.
>> So, the question is:
How do I chop off unwanted pixels from a flic? It would be something like
RENDER/REGION if it would allow me to specify the resolution in pixels…
Thanks very much for all replies!
-H
Hello Hugo,
Assuming that your flic is indeed a valid .FLC file format, you should not
suffer a performance hit arising from the "unused" border of your flic.
Provided that there is no frame to frame pixel movement/difference in this area
of the frames, the delta compression scheme used by the FLC format should
resolve to zero deltas after the second frame, thus no data is being
transferred to update each successive frame. There may however be a
performance hit arising from the screen driver that your flic file player may
be using to accomodate this image size.
In any case, you can easily crop your flic in 3D Studio using Video Post,
either by using your Flic or the Keyframer scene which created it as a Queue
entry. Do not enter anything in the alpha or trans boxes for this entry, then
simply use "offsets" (negative values) to set the top left corner of your
desired smaller output "window" to the correct position within the big flic,
you then set your final output flic width, height & aspect ratio as custom in
the final Rendering Dialog.
Animator Pro will also happily crop flics.
Cool…
Thanks, Brian, Thanks a bunch!
Hugo,
Choping off parts of the flic where there is no movement will not help in
reducing the delta playback of your flic. UNLESS there are pixels that are
"dancing" (changing from frame to frame) on the background during playback.
Tell us a little more. There may be a few tricks that can help.
Ralph
Hi Ralph,
Fisrt of all, thanks for your reply!
I am trying to find ways to make my flics get as light as possible to run from
a CD-ROM. 3D Studio is one of the tools we use to render our bitmaps and
animations, before packaging everything in Authorware Professional.
In the past, we used to render our stuff directly to the PAR, not having to
worry about performance during playback time… Now that we are in the
multimedia business (developing CD-ROM applications), we realize that my flics
are a bit TOO heavy to be played off a standard double-speed CD-ROM drive on a
low-end (consumer) multimedia PC (lets say a 486 with 8 MB RAM).
In this particular project, we have to deal with a large window (628 x 311
pixels) where we play our bitmaps and flics. What I thought I could do was
instead of having a huge 628 x 311 flic, I would play a small section of the
flic (in my case 75 x 95) on top of a snapshot of its first frame (628 x 311).
This is possible due to the fact that the animation happens in small isolated
areas of the screen whereas most of the pixels don't suffer any change.
In a similar way, if I was dealing with a plain bitmap (and not a flic) I would
go into Photoshop, load my image, use the select tool to isolate the desired
area and click on the "crop" command to crop the image to the new size. If I
only could do that with a flic…
Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Hugo
>> would go into Photoshop, load my image, use the select tool to isolate the
>> desired area and click on the "crop" command to crop the image to the new
>> size. If I only could do that with a flic…
Hugo,
You CAN crop a flic using Ani Pro. Animator Pro is a must if you do any
work rendering to flics.
Also:
1. Make sure you have no dancing pixels.
2. Render with Dither-256 OFF.
3. Make flic modifications with Ani Pro.
Hope that helps,
Ralph
Ralph,
I guess I'll go do my homework!
Thanks for the tips!