Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

This is more a question out of technical curiosity that arose from a discussion I was having today....

When one imports a video into TVP, does it get transcoded into an internal frame format specific to TVP? I was wondering about this when I was testing some video stuff with the Gimp and when you import a video into the Gimp's animation package, it uses mplayer for transcoding a video segment into the internal XCF format (or optionally PNG or JPG), so you get a whole bunch of individual XCF files, one for each frame. Does TVP do a similar kind of thing?

Again, just curious...

I think as long as you don't do anything with that video layer except shortening or shifting in time, it is just decoded like in your video player. Only when I apply some pixel-changing action it gets rendered as a full uncompressed 24bit image and stored that way in TVP's native format.

Am I right?

I suspected that was the case, since TVP isn't an NLE that does non-destructive editing.

slowtiger wrote:I think as long as you don't do anything with that video layer except shortening or shifting in time, it is just decoded like in your video player. Only when I apply some pixel-changing action it gets rendered as a full uncompressed 24bit image and stored that way in TVP's native format.

Am I right?

It is true, and important to add that only the frames which have been pixel-altered will be written into the TVP file.
So you can easily split your layers to sections on which you want to work, and leave the other video parts unaltered.
It'll keep the file lighter.