Animation Plugin for DV footage????

[couragefilms]

hi,

i've been checking out the look of the cutout feature in filters, but am wondering if anyone knows of another plugin, something that gives a cell shaded look, but doesn't destroy half the dv image in doing so??? any info would be great, thanks.

[YrbkMgr]

Don't know what you mean by a "cell", but could you be thinking of Layer Styles?

[couragefilms]

in 'cell', i'm talking about the animated cell shader look, something that gives the illusion that the dv footage was hand drawn or animated.

[Eric Purkalitis]

Are you talking about bringing in a filmstrip file from premiere? I haven't used that format before. It sounds something like an image sequence like the old FLC format.

I don't know if you have to edit each frame individually (using an action), or if you can apply effects to the entire image sequence. I'd try using some of the artistic filters, like Poster Edges.

It sounds like you might want be using Premiers, or more likely After Effects. In those apps you would be able mask off part of the video (...but doesn't destroy half the dv image in doing so) and you can get plug-ins (like video gogh) for a hand drawn effect.

I'd check out the After Effects and Premiere forums. Also look on sites like DV.com for other ideas.

[Burton Ogden]

CourageFilms,

You meant "cel-shaded" and the "cell" thing caused some confusion.

I don't have After Effects yet, so I currently use a combination of Photoshop and Corel Painter for video special effects. Painter can open an uncompressed AVI file as a "Frame Set" (FRM) which is a series of bitmap images comparable to Photoshop/Premiere's "filmstrip" format (FLM).

Painter can apply a script automatically to each image of an entire Frame Set and then export the result back to an AVI for a "round trip". Since Painter can also use most of Photoshop's filters, that makes it easy to apply a combination of Photoshop and Painter effects to an AVI. Of course an elaborate effect takes a lot of computer time.

Painter's Posterize filter can do a better job than Photoshop's Cutout. However, in Photoshop have you tried converting the images to Indexed Color with a specified small number (3 to maybe 7 or so) of colors and no dithering? That can give much better results than Cutout. Don't forget to change the Indexed mode back to RGB so you can use filters. You can smooth the edges of the indexed color zones with a touch of Median.

As Eric suggested, you can get the ink outlines that frequently appear in cel-shaded images using the Poster Edges filter.

-- Burton --