Rotoscoping
and autorotoscoping
Out of the box, Studio Artist comes packed with some of the
most powerful rotoscoping features available anywhere. This
isn't rotoscoping in the sense of removing guide wires from
a frame, though you can certainly do this. This is the ability
to recreate the individual frames of a movie as if they had
been hand-painted. It's called autorotoscoping, and it involves
some pretty sophisticated algorithms coupled with an intuitive
methodology.
Since
a large portion of Studio Artist's market is composed of designers,
you might not know exactly what rotoscoping is. Very briefly,
it means manipulating individual frames of a movie. But Studio
Artist takes it a step farther.
It works
through a process called PASeq, or "paint action sequence."
Essentially, Studio Artist can record every single thing you
do to an image and apply your actions to subsequent images or,
as the case may be, movie frames. Using the example discussed
above, I can have Studio Artist automatically recreate one frame
as a soft painting with edge sketch, then apply the same effects
to subsequent frames, with each brush stroke individually painted.
You can click on the images below to see QuickTime examples
of Studio Artist's rotoscoping capabilities.
Now take
it a step further still. Studio Artist is resolution-independent.
The strokes that Studio Artist creates are based on the color,
luminosity and saturation of sampled points from an image, not
on specific pixels. This means you can work off low-resolution
files and generate files of any resolution.
Of course,
you can also work manually on a frame by frame basis, using
all of the painting tools available in the paint synthesizer.
You can also, for example, record specific paint paths and animate
your strokes over time, across layers, up and down in scale,
etc. You can even use it as an animation tool. (Click
here to see my example of using Studio Artist for animation.)
For that matter, you can even use it to record QuickTime movies
as you paint. (Click
here to see an example of this.)
Now, keep
in mind that pictures don't paint themselves quickly. Studio
Artist's rotoscoping capabilities are powerful, but sometimes
render times can be quite long. It is drawing each frame stroke
by stroke, after all. But render times vary widely depending
on what you want to do. You can render at a frame per second
or a few minutes per frame. That's just the cost for the quality
that comes out of this application.
The
bottom line
It's impossible to go into all of the features of Studio Artist
in one lifetime. In fact, the program's creator once confessed
to me that even he doesn't know everything this program does.
Suffice to say that you will be pleasantly surprised by Studio
Artist just about every time you launch it. You might buy it
for its painting capabilities, but you will be drawn into its
motion effects as well. You might come to it for rotoscoping,
in which case you will find there is nothing else like it available
on any platform. I give Studio Artist an unreserved strong buy
recommendation.
By the way,
you can visit a number of tutorials here at Digital Media Net.
Specific links are provided on the opening page of this review.
You can also check in at the Studio Artist user forum here
at the WWUG, which happens to be hosted by me. Or you can
visit Synthetik at http://www.synthetik.com.
Stay tuned for many more tutorials as we explore this amazingly
powerful program.
