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Hi All

I have a basic question, I'm a newbie, about to export my first TV paint job onto a drive to courier for editing in Europe (so very scary, as I can't be there for the edit/grading)!
I'm using the Standard edition and a Mac Book 10.11.05, and I want to know what file type to export as? I have not merged any layers as yet, and am hoping I do not have to bother doing that? My main worry is what format to export in: is it true that in early tests editors said that it would be ok to export animation as a lossless QuickTime .mov rather than as PNG ? I'm confused because TV Paint tells me that Quicktime isn't a good format to export in. I'm a Mac user, if that helps? Also, is it true that TV paint was developed for PC's, so us Mac users should not stress about this concern re: Quicktime?
I've spent 3 months on this job and it is the first animation I have been able to do in 19 years, so I am keen for the results to be as good as possible and not messed up due to technical stuff. My question is: what should I export in to get precise results? I have to do it tomorrow.

Cheers

Susan Y

SYoung wrote:Hi All

I have a basic question, I'm a newbie, about to export my first TV paint job onto a drive to courier for editing in Europe (so very scary, as I can't be there for the edit/grading)!
I'm using the Standard edition and a Mac Book 10.11.05, and I want to know what file type to export as? I have not merged any layers as yet, and am hoping I do not have to bother doing that? My main worry is what format to export in: is it true that in early tests editors said that it would be ok to export animation as a lossless QuickTime .mov rather than as PNG ?

I'm confused because TV Paint tells me that Quicktime isn't a good format to export in. I'm a Mac user, if that helps? Also, is it true that TV paint was developed for PC's, so us Mac users should not stress about this concern re: Quicktime?
I've spent 3 months on this job and it is the first animation I have been able to do in 19 years, so I am keen for the results to be as good as possible and not messed up due to technical stuff. My question is: what should I export in to get precise results? I have to do it tomorrow.

Cheers

Susan Y

It's not so much that Quicktime isn't a good format , it's that Quicktime is being abandoned by Apple. It's still alive for Apple users in existing applications . I still use my Quicktime 7 Pro almost every day.

Anyway, I just had a conversation about export formats with an editor recently. He needed me to export each layer of a scene as an individual element with transparent background for assembling in editing and compositing with a CG background.

He had expressed a preference for files exported with Apple ProRes 4444 codec, which supports transparency , but that codec is only available if using the 32bit version of TVPaint . I prefer using 64bit for the added speed , but 64bit version only has the AVI export and Export to FFMpeg .MOV in either Lossless (Apple PNG) or Compressed (MPEG-4) . The FFMpeg Lossless (Apple PNG) supports transparency. I ran a test and the editor said that the file exported from TVPaint 64bit with FFMpeg Lossless codec worked fine , as good as the Apple ProRes 4444 exported from TVPaint 32bit.

Settings: FFMpeg MOV , Lossless , RGBA mode , Background UNCHECKED .
(click image to see it larger)

That said ,exporting to a PNG image sequence also yields very good results. For final color images I would lean towards exporting as PNG Image Sequence.
(if you need to support transparent alpha layer in PNG then use the RGBA mode) . PNG image sequence can be imported to Premiere or Final Cut or AfterEffects and no loss of quality.

I made a little tutorial for my students which might help you:

Export PNG Image Sequence from TVPaint

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Thats very helpful, thanks!