Hi all,
I've taken one class on basic animation and need to create a short animation in short order for a friend of mine. It doesn't need to be very clean or sophisiticated.
I was hoping to do it in Flash because of the ease of re-using elements and whatnot. My issue is how to get my hand drawn images into digital format in a quick manner. I have photoshop, flash, premier, a web cam and a scanner. Ideally, I'm thinking to input the hand drawn images, process the images to remove the whites of the pages leaving me the equivalent of a cell, import into flash and sequence.
I find that the web cam is much quicker to do importing via premier but the image quality is crap and this makes removing the white of the page very difficult, cause there isn't any. Scanning yields a much nicer image but is slower. I was hoping to figure out one of two things:
1> Should I get a better digital camera? The question behind this question is - What kind of digital camera? I borrowed my Mom's Toshiba but I can't figure out how to get it to work as a capture device for premier. This makes me wonder what feature the camera needs to have to allow it's use as a capture device. Any ideas here?
2> Should I use the scanner? To do this reasonably, I need to figure out how to get on-click scanning working and then some kind of batch image processing via photoshop on the resulting mass of images. I don't know how to do this. Any ideas here either?
I know this is kinda long, but if anybody has any thoughts about how to proceed or pointers to information, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've done numerous searches but I'm not sure what to search on and they've yielded little thus far.
Thanks in advance,
-Mark
Probably the simplest and cheapest way to do this is to download the trial version of Streamline, scan your images in Streamline, convert them to vector in Streamline, then import them into Flash. That should work, and you spend no money buying new hardware and soft ware.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
Omnigon has a good point, and is referring to a method that I've used several times in the past. I was a Classical Animator thinking like a classical animator, wanting to do classical animation on flash.
There's only one problem with that though. When you take your original line drawing and do what's called "trace bitmapping", Flash, being a vector based software, will convert your bitmap image into a vector image, by picking out the dark and light tones.
The first thing is, unless you have a solid, black, inked, clean line, you'll end up with messy results,when you try to select and delete the white areas. You have to really play with the settings to make it easier to delete the white areas. If you're doing a rough sketch, then forget about it. It'll just be a mess that you'll never be able to clean up.
And something else to consider about that is, when you use this method, and finally do get the results you want (visually), if you zoom in closely to your lines, you'll notice that they're composed of THOUSANDS of vector points, which in Flash, makes your animation extremely heavy. You'll realize that after 5 or 6 frames, Flash is so weighed down with vectors, that it slows everything down, and even potentially crashes.
Flash basically provides that option for the sake of being able to convert jpeg drawings to vector images, but that doesn't mean that your computer will appreciate you using this method.
BUT, if you're looking for ways to clean up your drawing in Flash, keep it nice and light, and get impressive results, then check out what I wrote under the thread "Hey Flashers - Question for ya" thread.
Coincidentally, I just gave a guy advice on a few good techniques for doing clean-up line using flash. It's all there for you.
Adam
PS...if you're considering just animating by hand, scanning them into flash and setting them up on your timeline and hitting play, that is doable, but make sure that the image size is at MOST 72 dpi, and don't make your image any larger than 640 by 480. Otherwise, it'll get heavy and slow down. It's not really designed for that kind of animation, although if you're careful, you can get away with that. You can also adjust and align every drawing frame by frame once they're all set up, although you'll have to do that by hand, one frame at a time, unless of course, you already drew, scanned and cropped every image perfectly.
Hello.
You might try getting a package of Flipbook and using that for your film.
You need a good scanner and that's it.
Flipbook will do your penciltests and when you gone into the INK AND PAINT mode -you just double click on the images and paint them like being in Photoshop.
Now, I am NOT a complete techno-phobe but close and Kent Braun (from Digicel Inc.- which makes Flipbook) walked me through the process a couple of days ago and I learned it in about ten minutes. I like "easy" and Flipbook is very easy.
Heck, go to the Flipbook site (digicelinc.com) - tell me you are a memeber of this forum and see if he will give you a discount.
Thanks.
Larry
web site
http://tooninst[URL=http://tooninstitute.awn.com]itute.awn.com
[/URL]blog:
[U]http://www.awm.com/blogs/always-animated
[/U] email:
larry.lauria@gmail.com
Thanks for the info. What I'm settling in on is scanning into photoshop, batch save and then batch convert with streamline and then import into and sequence with flash.
When I get it all done, I'll post a link
-Mark
He Mark,
One thing to note about Streamline. Although I've known many people to preach how effective it is, I've noticed from my own experience that it can cause files to be larger than needed. Streamline can have a tendency to create attractive lines, but at the cost of increased vector points, which ultimately makes the file size large.
This isn't necessarily a problem if you're working with less symbols, and using the Flash tools to re-use your symbols in a "puppet animation" type Flash animation, but if you're planning on creating larger scenes with a greater number of images, backgrounds, sounds etc...Streamline isn't size effective. You'll end up having to take the frustrating time necessary to clean up and optimize your scene...one bloody symbol at a time.
Like they say...sometimes it's better to take the "long short cut". Take the time to do it right the first time. Save yourself the long and arduous task of cleaning up and correcting everything, often leading you to having to start all over again.
Adam.
So you want to use Flash so you can reuse elements, but you have a lot of drawings to scan? Seems like there's a disconnect somewhere here to me.
Well, your praise of me as a classical animator is a bit too kind. I've taken one class and my art skills suck. As you will see. But, I really don't like the too smooth vector feel of most flash. Although what I'm learning is that that's the result of laziness more than a limitation of flash.
Here's the end result. Be kind. Not bad for my first animation outside of class. It even got showed to the public as part of a dance piece at an art fest. Not sure what the reaction was though because I was too busy trying to make sure that it played correctly.
Thankyou so much for your suggestions. It really made a huge difference in my ability to get this thing done.
If you are curious, here's a link to the end result, such as it is.
http://www.senator.org/~mparker/animations/rats.short.swf
No disconnect D. He's a classical animator who'se venturing into the world of Flash. I had the same misconception when I first picked it up...basically, thinking that computers are as intuitive as pencils. After f'ing with Flash for a while, I realized that Flash was a fussy little bugger that wanted things done its way...or of course, the highway.
The desire to produce the illusion of 3 dimensional characters, but working with a 2D software is something that Flash can achieve but with a little creativity. That's the question up on this thread. It's not so much the issue of reusing images, moreso, being able to use many seperate images effectively.
Adam
my advice would be to scan them. You can then set up an "action" (look on line for tutorials on how to create actions in photoshop) in photoshop that will adjust the LEVELS (tweak the white and black level in your image) of the images to be a nice clean piece of black and white line art, then have it save them as jpegs less than 150 dpi. You can then import those jpegs into the flash timeline. If you import 1 image and all the others have consecutive naming convention (i.e. lineart_001, lineart_002, lineart_003...) flash will ask you to automatically import them in order. Once they are imported you can then use the "trace Bitmap" option that does a pretty good job of converting them to vectors. You can then delete the white area outside of your line art and color all the rest.
It's quick and dirty, but it sounds like that technique would work the best for you. I only use my digital camera for line testing my animation. When it comes time to get the art into my Leica Reel I'll scan them at high rez and work them over.
Hope this helps.