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APRIL 09, 2004 Revisiting Write-on Effects in Studio Artist 3
Preparing the movie stream Now we have to set Studio Artist's movie processing to be able to output a QuickTime file with a proper alpha channel. This is a two-step process.[an error occurred while processing this directive] 1. Choose Action > Process File Settings. For Out Alpha, select "Layer Alpha."  2. Choose File > Preferences > Movie Compression. This will call up a standard QuickTime encoding dialog, in which you can set your frame rate (more on that later), codec, quality, etc. In Studio Artist, as with all QuickTime-based applications, if you want an alpha channel in your final output, you'll have to choose a codec that supports alpha channels and also set the color depth to "Millions of Colors+" (the "+" being the alpha channel).  Standard codecs that can handle alpha channels include Animation, None (uncompressed), Planar RGB, PNG, TGA and TIFF. I tend to use the Animation codec at "Best" quality because it's a lossless codec that takes up a lot less hard drive space than the uncompressed ("None") option. Note: In Studio Artist 3, your Movie Compression settings determine not only the frame rate of your animation, but the speed at which your final effect is played back. I don't know the exact correlation between frame rate and playback speed, but the more frames per second you record, the faster the effect plays back, regardless of how many frames per second of animation you're capturing. (See the "recording the write-on effect" section below.) But here's something important to consider. With large file sizes and/or complex brushes, the actual performance of Studio Artist can degrade tremendously, since it's writing frames to your disk as you draw. So, if you're getting poor drawing performance, you might want to set your frames per second to something like 30 (as I do on my dual 1 GHz G4) so that, in the end, your animation doesn't appear jumpy. You'll want to experiment with a few different settings to get it just right. Prev 1 2 3 4 Next Related sites: Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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