fairing and rotoscoping, please!

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jeff
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fairing and rotoscoping, please!

Post by jeff »

There are a few features I would dearly love to see in Moho and I fear that they are not planned for ver. 5.

1 - The program needs better control over fairings. Fairings are accelerations and decelerations between two key frames. By way of example, for a violent animation such as bringing an axe down on a piece of firewood, you would want the move to speed up from the first to second key through the whole action. At present, the only way of doing this that I am aware of is to go into graph mode and tediously add extra keys then smooth the graph shape by eye to what you're after. Other types of fairings such as smooth and ease in / ease out are given and are of course useful, but I would love to have ease in only or ease out only as other right-click options. Better still, as in the Animo program, it would be nice to be able to easily alter the shape of fairing graph lines just by tweaking the keys. Animo also has a fairings library such as for camera shakes (think dropping an anvil and the whole room judders) and I suspect this would be easy to implement for clever people who know how to program in the scripting language.

2 - I would very much like to be able to read in a numbered series of Tiff, TGA or PNG etc. files as a background layer for reference; in other words, I want rotoscoping. This is implemented in the very much more expensive rival Tab 2.2 program and I am sure it would be popular.

3 - lastly, a much less important feature for me but still welcome: I'd like a "graticule" that cam be switched on or off - by this I mean something like the markings seen in the viewfinder of a film camera with cross hairs and other reference lines. The difference between this and the present grid option is that the graticule stays firmly put whatever you do to layers so acting as an absolute reference to screen centre etc.

I'd just like to say that $19 seems extraordinarily reasonable for such a major upgrade and I hope others will agree that this is a price well worth paying.
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7feet
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Post by 7feet »

Hey Jeff- I'll give this a bit of a shot. First, I'll go to last request. I whipped up a Graticule for you. It's basically a grid, set to not render, immune to camera movement and depth of field, and with only outlines set on the layer visibility. Leave it as your uppermost layer and it seems to work fine. The server I put the file on seems to be a little iffy at the moment, so it might take a bit for it to be available.

For the rotoscoping, There are numerous little (or huge, if that's your choice) utilities to convert image sequences to various video formats. In Moho 4.6 quicktime movies imported to image layers just fine for rotoscoping. Moho 5 seems to also support .AVI's now. The video in the image layers inside the editing window in Moho 5 still seems to be pretty well busted, but I imagine that'll be tuned up pretty soon. It's a little roundabout, and I agree that direct importing of image sequences would be convenient, but it is usable as it stands.

Also, from a quick look inside a .Moho file, the keyframe type seems to be desribed by a single digit number, with no other apparent variables, so I don't know if tweaking of the parameters for ease in/out, etc, would be possible at this point shy of retooling parts of the file format, but that's just me, LM has to chime in on that one. Also, you can get some of that "shaking the room" using the "noisy" keyframes in Moho 5.

Hope that's some assistance.

--Brian
nobudget
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Post by nobudget »

I think a "roomshake" effect can be achieved in the new version by creating a bone layer where every other layer is in and adding a bone to that layer. The new bone dynamics give the option to wiggle and dampen and such so you can shake the whole animation. I hope this is understandable, I'm just brainstorming here so sorry for the semi-incoherent writing style...

I often use video background layers, works very well.

Good luck,

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

The simplest way to create a shaky camera would be to just set the interpolation type of some camera keyframes to Noisy. Add a camera keyframe just before you want the noise to start (key A), and a keyframe when you want it to end (key B). Then, set the interpolation of key A to Noisy.

Play with the amplitude and scale of the noisy interpolation.
nobudget
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Post by nobudget »

Good suggestion. BTW, just before I started working with the beta with the build-in handheld camera option I needed that effect for a 1 minute video. I created an image layer with video, set the view to wire frame for the best frame-rate performance, enlarged the layer a bit, pressed play and just moved the mouse slightly as if it were an unsteady camera. Worked great! Moho is my favorite video post-production tool and it isn't even created for that!

And the new version looks good so far, I'm just not sold on the seperate window interface...is it possible to make windows (un)dockable so there is a choice?

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com
jeff
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Post by jeff »

Thanks everyone for the helpful replies. I'll give them a spin.

I am fortunate in that I have a dual monitor setup so unwanted menus etc. can be parked out of the way but still visible. I must say that on a single monitor, the new screen furniture is a bit of a mess compared with ver. 4 and I hope LM can find a way of cleaning it up. Is there a preferred monitor resolution for ver. 5?
jeff
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Post by jeff »

PS...

Brian

As you said, your server is a bit iffy and I couldn't follow your link, but reading your post, I just realised I am being a total dimwit since I forgot that you can make a layer immune to camera movements, so there goes 33% of my wishlist. It's a piece of cake to make a graticule design in the top layer, make the layer partially transparent and immune to camera moves and the job is done.

Thanks again, anyhow.

Jeff
Barliesque
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Post by Barliesque »

For converting a bitmap series to avi video (or Flash to bitmap series or video) here is a freeware program: http://www.pizzinini.net/?category=8&it ... ef=swf2avi (Windows only, I'm afraid)

For another approach to rotoscoping, have a look at this thread:
http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 2&start=30
nobudget wrote:Moho is my favorite video post-production tool and it isn't even created for that!
That is fantastic! :D
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