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beethoven73 wrote:lines are a bit... I don't know... broken up mabye?

which lines do you refer to? drawn lines, or color gradients line (banding)?

Drawing lines. It seems to be alright... I think the look just takes a bit getting used to. Right now I'm having a whole other issue: I'm following along with one of the animation tutorials on the site, but for some reason the 'add image after' button and the 'duplicate image right' button are doing the same thing... they're duplicating the image. I'm trying to add a blank image with the 'add image right' button, but it won't add a blank image, it adds a copy of the original. Frustrating!

Ahhh... nevermind... I figured it out. I had to convert the image layer to an animation layer... wierd.

hi beethoven,
yes, "Add Image After" adds a blank image when on an AnimLayer.
that's said, I suggest you to upload and use the "Instance Panel" to edit the timeline .
("add Empty after" is the [+E>] button)
I've heard this handy custom panel will be included in the next public release.

Looks cool... does it work on a Mac?

beethoven73 wrote:Looks cool... does it work on a Mac?

I'm not on Mac, but I know some Mac users who are using the Instance panel for a while now,
so, I don't think I'm taking any risk to answer : Yes !

Anyway, here's one more little question: I've been reading up on the 8bit vs. 16bit thing, and from the best I can find, TVPaint is still in 8bit. Now, does this end up affecting the quality significantly once it is being up-converted to film (assuming I'm working in HDTV mode)?

I've been living this for the past two weeks so I have something to say about the process. There is nothing to worry about... what Sandra and I see on our 24 inch wide screen monitors every day we now have been watching on a 30 foot screen every day in a filmout studio. It looks the same. You can walk up close to the screen and see no difference from sticking your nose to your monitor.

What you should be aware of is the length of time it takes to prepare a filmout -- it IS a slow, tedious and mistake prone process. One has to keep a sharp eye and mind open while one watches this grass grow: it takes about two hours to convert one minute of 1080 non-compressed AVI to a PNG image sequence. For an 80 minute film we are talking about a week of running your computer day and night.

If you made your film and corresponding sound track to run, naturally, at 24 fps, the filmout/color grade process requires the sound track to now run at NTSC 23.970 or whatever it is (just a poor memory figure; not looking at anything). It takes 3 full days at the filmout facility to color grade at roughly $ 10, 000 per day and another $ 10,000 to just recieve a DOLBY certificate.

So don't worry about quality -- just throw lots of money around and you are good to go.

Oh, and there's more to throw money at: $ 20,000 to the film lab for the first answer print. But wait, THERE'S MORE! as they say on TV. you can't even start thinking about getting an animated feature these days noticed by reviewers without mega-star actor/voice overs; about $ 50,000 a pop if their agents are generous, and you can't get viewers to crawl out to the theater without star power supported reviews. Then comes the time you have to find a distributor -- which is easy to fail at; it might not even happen if you don't know the tricks (hint: all the tricks involve lots of money). So to draw and animate the film is the easiest and cheapest and least worrisome part. You might be a jump-into-freezing-water kind of guy, but don't even start thinking of the splash without an armful of cash.

Something else to think about: How many 2D films make it big to the big screen these days? Just about zero in the past 10 or 20 years (who can remember anymore?). There is not much sympathy from distributors, I can tell you that much. So little in fact, you need lots of cash to make them watch your DVD for the first 10 minutes (and they never watch the whole thing for any amount of money -- they give that horrendous job to an intern who by some unwritten law isn't permitted to be over 20 years-old and if possible, must speak and understand only Urdu or maui. The ending of a feature animated 2D film isn't important anymore; no one waits that long, especially not the intern). You don't even have to finish your film.

Paul-

Does that mean your movie is done?

Have you got into the cash flow of the DCP yet? (Digital projection). A small documentary I've been working on is to premier early next year. About 1 hr. long.

Getting favors and deals: Quicktime to HDCAM-SR tape $300, 5.1 .wav files (free), Encoding: $15,000, Drive per theater: $250, Emailing the key to the theater: $50 per screen, VPF: $1,000 per screen (actually, that varies-Virtual Print Fee), Color Correction was free too. http://mkpe.com/digital_cinema/faqs/ click about for more.

And, of course, there's the cost of trying to get an Academy Award...

So, I wonder how much would it have cost to get the whole thing into theaters if you'd gone with ink and paint instead of digital? (that's a rhetorical question, I know it would have been substantially more)

2d films? Let's see. Studio Ghibli films (Miyazaki's stuff), South Park (which is technically 3d, even though it looks 2d). Simpson's movie, Spongebob movie=I think those made money in US theatrical release. I'm sure there have been a couple of others. So, maybe five or six in the last 20 years. Certainly not as much money as 3d films have made though.

If Tulip can get enough advertising backing, I'm sure you'll be rolling in cash in no time

Oh yeah.

Beethoven, did you look at Animo, Toonz, Retas Pro, or others? If Paul's style seems to work for you, TVPaint is probably the way to go. Flipbook might work for you too. Animo is expensive. The other two are vector-based (more or less). Oh, Pencil too. It's even free (though I don't think I would want to do a whole feature with it).

Really comes down to how you want to work, and what 'feels right' to you. You could do the whole thing in a 3d package, and have it spit out a 'cel shaded' 2d look too.
TVP's way of doing things is often clunky. Not that other software doesn't have it's own clunky-ness. The more mentions of how to 'work around' things you see, the more tedious you can expect the workflow to be.

yeah, I did look at Animo and Retas Pro. Animo looked pretty cool, but the info on the site was way to limited for me to really get a good grasp of what it was all about, and it's just wierd to me that they don't have the price on the site... you have to send them a message... strange. I prefer a program with a site and a message board and a decent ammount of info ahead of time (as well as a demo version). Similar thing with Retas. I couldn't find all that much on Toonz.

Flipbook just doesn't seem to have quite the drawing and painting tools I'd like to utilize... though I really do like the slimmed down interface.

Paul, those expenses you bring up are certainly very eye openning, and somewhat disheartening and depressing as well. I did a little research the other day on what it costs to transfer from HD to film, and was pretty shocked at the cost... which you've now essentially confirmed. Let me ask you... is this any cheeper if you start out working larger... say 4k? Anyway, what can I do... I just have to do my project the best I can, and then take it from there. If nothing comes of it, and no one cares then I'll have to deal with that then. I have various minor (some a bit bigger then minor) connections that might be able to help out once I'm done, but none of that is garaunteed. I deffinately don't plan on having any 'star voices' in this. Oh, and one 2D animation film that did pretty good last year was "Persepolis".

So... couple more quick questions... when I test one of my animations with the 'playback review' button, it plays back VERY pixellated. Is that just how it is with the preview, or is there any way to preview it at a higher quality (as close to possible as to what it is supposed to look like). And... How do you simply cut and copy a section of and frame onto a section of another frame. When I use one of the select tools... say the freehand select... and circle an area, then hit the standard key command for 'cut', instead of just cutting that selection, it cuts the entire image! Oh... ehh... and how do you deselect?

beethoven73 wrote:Animo looked pretty cool

I worked with it 15 years ago, basically it has the abilities of Anime Studio (or better the other way round since it was first) in creating a puppet and manipulate it, plus the ability to ink&paint and composite scanned-in images. It doesn't have frame-by-frame drawing ability, as far as I know. Price was about 5000.- € last time I checked.

Toonz is ink&paint only. Retas was a complete package, but is somewhat outdated now. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here, anyone.)

beethoven73 wrote:is this any cheeper if you start out working larger... say 4k?

Nope. Never. It is only more expensive because you need a more powerful processor and much more disk space.

There are shops everywhere who offer transfer to film in decent quality. You don't need to bother about that right now, if you're finished then it is time to ask around for prices. Also with a finished project you could get some funding.

beethoven73 wrote:when I test one of my animations with the 'playback review' button, it plays back VERY pixellated

Yes. That's why I export a sequence to Quicktime to check. Maybe it's just my hardware (PPC G5 1,8 GHz Dual).

beethoven73 wrote:How do you simply cut and copy a section of and frame onto a section of another frame.

Timeline. Select a frame or a range of frames by click&drag, copy frames (right mouse click menu), select target, paste. The keyboard shortcuts of TVP are kind of awkward for someone who is used to other software, but you can change all of them to your taste. 'Deselect' is a button in the selection palette, but you can assign a shortcut for this as well.

beethoven73 wrote: Oh... ehh... and how do you deselect?

if you still are with one of the selection tools, and if you don't need your selection anymore,
you can simply "clear" the selection,
otherwise, toggle Off the "Stencil" button, (toggle ON will recover your last selection),
tvpa "Stencil" notion is a bit confusing for newbies, as it includes Stencil layer(s)
AND Selection area(s) when some defined.

beethoven73 wrote:when I test one of my animations with the 'playback review' button, it plays back VERY pixellated. Is that just how it is with the preview, or is there any way to preview it at a higher quality?

how closer to 'best' quality when previewing, is mainly dependent on your hardware.
first of all, go to the menu Windows > Custom Panels, you should see a Preview Quality panel that you can bring up. This allows you flexibility in preview.
Secondly, you can try setting the Preview setting in the preview panel to 'Proxy' and then play with different bitrate setting, which directly affects the quality at which the animation is rendered to the cache/disk.

Thanks slowtiger, but I think you misunderstood my question: I know how to copy a frame or selection of frames, what I want to do is, say, if I draw a face, I want to copy the eyes and mouth and paste them on the next frame... or another image... but I don't want to copy the entire frame.

I agree, the keyboard short-cuts are awkward... once I buy the program (I'm leading towards it) I'll look more into customizing all the short-cuts and such. I'm very used to command+d being desect in other programs.

I'm on a PPC G5 1.8Ghz also. It's a good machine, but I"m probably going to get an intel lap top to dedicate to the animation. That way I can leave the G5 for the music end of things (not to mention those damn macbooks are more powerful then my G5 tower anyway!).