Digital Media Designer: Tutorial: Post Processing in Studio Artist

9. Finally I applied my last and favorite Image Operation: Watershed. I just used the default settings here to add a little wetness to the image. I think it helps get rid of some of the strokes and colors that look out of place and gives the image more of a painted, rather than sketched, look.

Applying your settings to a movie
So now we have the effect we want for one of our frames, and we want to apply it to our entire movie. At this point, you'll want to uncheck the record button in the Paint Action window. If you've followed along, your command list should look like the window below.

If you've accidentally stuck in some unwanted commands, it's easy enough to get rid of them from your sequence. Just uncheck the commands you don't want. If you get tired of looking at them in your list, just select Action > Paint Action Commands > Delete Muted Paint Action Commands. This will delete all commands that are unchecked.

Now, before we apply our PASeq (Paint Action Sequence) to our movie, make sure you save your command sequence. If you crash, you'll lose all of this and will have to start over, so it's always good to keep a few backups. To save a sequence, just select Action > Export Paint Action Sequence. I always put a .paseq extension on the end of mine, just so I can keep them straight, but it's unnecessary.

So here we go. To apply your PASeq, select the menu item Movie > Process Movie File with PASeq > To Movie.

You will first be asked whether you want to save your current canvas. Don't. Then you'll be asked to select the movie to process and the output size. Finally, you'll be asked for a movie name. Don't give it the same name as your original movie, or you might have problems.

TIP: Earlier I said you should output no more than eight or 10 frames per second. By default, Studio Artist will output at the same frame rate as your source movie. So, if your source was created at 30 frames per second, your output will be at 30 frames per second. You can change this by selecting Movie > Process File Settings. Here you can set the frame rate (based on your timeline settings) and the number of source frames to skip. Your timeline frame rate, by default, is 10. You can lower this by going into the Timeline palette and entering a value of 8.

So now you see your movie being rendered, each stroke being repainted right before your eyes. Here's where you begin to understand the value of economy. If you apply a large number of paint strokes and effects to an image, your render will take forever. As it is, my PASeqs for these examples take about one or two hours to process 176 frames.

But, in the end, I wound up with some pretty nice pieces of footage.

This week we looked at the very basics of rotoscoping in Studio Artist. Next time we'll look at a few more things you can do. For example, you can vary your paint strokes over time, manually paint onto a movie and do a whole host of other things. So stay tuned for pieces on these features. In the meantime, make sure you visit the Creative Mac tutorials section and the Digital Media Designer tutorial section for more indepth looks at the tools of Studio Artist.

If you have any further questions, be sure to visit me in the Synthetik Studio Artist user forum.

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