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FEBRUARY 19, 2004 Synthetik Studio Artist 3.0
Production in Studio Artist Now we've had a look at a fairly good portion of what Studio Artist has to offer in the way of tools. So what can you actually do with this software? Obviously Studio Artist is a tremendous tool for painting, by far the most robust currently available. With more than 400 parameters and 13 base brush types--plus 3,000 preset brushes--it gives you the means to produce anything you wish to produce, whether you simply want to emulate traditional media in your paintings or move into more experimental modes with the wealth of tools available.[an error occurred while processing this directive]For those of you working in film/video and animation, Studio Artist provides even more. Every single tool in Studio Artist can be used on motion graphics, either by processing an existing source of footage (as it can process still images) or creating an animation from scratch. Rotoscoping For rotoscoping, Studio Artist offers a unique feature called "intelligent-assisted drawing." What this means in practical terms is that any of the brushes supplied with the program (or those you create) can be made to apply automatically to any image or sequence of images. This is a feature that's been available since Studio Artist's first release, and the functionality is essentially identical except that the range of options and the sophistication of the tracking technologies have increased quite significantly. The way it works is this. First, you load up your original video footage. You apply your paint strokes and any effects/adjustments you wish to make while Studio Artist records everything you do. If you're satisfied with the result, you then process the entire movie, while Studio Artist adjusts all of your effects and brush strokes to match each individual frame of your sequence. So, in other words, you get automated, frame by frame, stroke by stroke video processing. And, if you happen to be going for a painted or hand-drawn look, you will not find anything that does it better than Studio Artist. We've posted several examples of Studio Artist's rotoscoping capabilities in the past, and I don't intend to repeat much of it here. Here's an example of a short clip automatically rotoscoped in Studio Artist to create a fairly smooth sketch effect. Studio Artist records each of your actions as a step in a "Paint Action Sequence," which has its own timeline so that effects can be keyframed.  For example, you might want to start with a blank screen and then have the sketch-style strokes build up to form a complete image, then transition to live footage. That's really just a matter of a few steps in Studio Artist, and none of it is manual. It's simply a matter of choosing the type of brush you like and then applying it to a frame by hitting the Action button. The build-up process looks something like this. And there you have your "hand-painted" frame. Paint effects are only one possibility for rotoscoping in Studio Artist. We'll explore many more over the course of the year. (We also have many already in our tutorial archives, which you can access here.) Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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