Image degradation in keyframer

[Janet Perlman]

Hi TVPaint friends,

I have been getting blurry results with the key framer. I am adding a little weaving back and forth motion for a character floating in the sky. There is only a panning left and right motion, no zoom or rotation. The scene is at a much lower res than I normally would work at - 1280 X 720, which I won't go into, but it's a given, so maybe a higher resolution would not give such bad results. When I apply the move, every sixth or seventh frame is in focus, but the rest are unacceptably blurred. I see no correlation between what’s in focus and the particular drawing or position.
I am using TVPaint10 pro 64 bit, Mac OS Mountain Lion and Yosemite.
Here is an image of the original drawing, beside the blurred result. Why would the key framer do this, when the move only consists of panning?

[slowtiger]

The blurriness occurs because the keyframer calculates with sub-pixels.

Imagine moving some drawing over 10 pixels in 20 frames. The positions will be 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, and so on. Usually the calculated positions will never be whole pixels. That's why a line which is exactly 3 px wide gets to be spread over 4 or even 5 px.

Usually you will not notice this in movement, especially not with coloured characters. I recommend to store the keyframer movement in the bin and re-do it with the coloured character for best result.

The pan tool uses positions on whole pixels only, so that may be an alternative, but then you'd do it by hand.

[Janet Perlman]

That perfectly answers my question. Thank you!

[Peter Wassink]

There are a couple of FX's available that you can add to the stack to undo this blurriness.
notably:
Keying > "Alpha control"

and here is a thread where an other method is discussed:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7157&hilit=sharpen&start=15#p64595" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

if you set this correct it will sharpen the line to its original appearance.


Generally its better to work in a higher resolution because when finished you can always easily render it out in any desired lower resolution.
This will also help minimize these subpixel blur effects.

[slowtiger]

Generally its better to work in a higher resolution because when finished you can always easily render it out in any desired lower resolution.

Recently I realized I maybe animate too small for my style and level of detail. But I have problems to draw bigger - always had, I was raised with only limited paper supply and hoarded even smallest pieces of paper to draw on, my characters were only thumbnail size (with pen & ink), and not until working in a studio I was forced to actually use broader strokes on bigger paper.

I experimented a lot with different combinations of project size and brush size, and found I'm quite comfortable with really broad brushes which give me a range between 1 and about 50 px for expression. Next I will test working in 4K (specifically UHD 3840 x 2160 px) - the computer's just powerful enough now for that.

[Janet Perlman]

Thanks Slowtiger and Peter. I would not choose to work at this resolution, but I am working on scenes that were already animated at this size. That alpha effect is very good, but in this case, the blurriness is to a different degree on every frame. But I found a solution. David Fine suggested that I upres the scene, then do the move, and then downres again. The whole level came out blurry, but not more blurry, but the blurriness was uniform. I then applied that alpha effect and now it looks fine. So thanks everybody.