Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

My apologies in advance for the number of questions. I've read the forums, watched the videos and read the instructions but there are still a number of things I don't understand. I've already had to start over twice.

I'm a new user of TVPaint and just beginning to animate the first clips of what will eventually become a 7 minute short. The final output is set at HDTV 1080 with a drawing area of 3840 x 2160. My questions are about backgrounds. I'm drawing them in Photoshop. There are over 50 backgrounds, many are shared in multiple clips, many will have camera moves. But there are some that are one-offs with no camera moves.

-- For scenes with camera moves, I'm creating backgrounds in Photoshop the same dimensions as my TVPaint drawing area (3840x2160). What resolution should my background drawings be? Will 72 dpi become fuzzy if shown on a big theater screen? Is 200 or 300 dpi overkill?
-- For scenes that don't have camera moves is it best to use the full drawing area (3840 x2160) or the size of the camera view (1920 x 1080)?
-- These backgrounds are line drawings. Should I leave the background drawings transparent or add a color fill layer in Photoshop? Is there a way to add a color fill layer in TVPaint, similar to the way I can in Photoshop?
-- I'm getting an error message when I try to import a background. What is the correct png profile?
-- Is there a way to link to a background image or do I have to import it? I'm a little wary about using the image library since it appears that they store on my computer, and I would rather that storage take place on my RAID.

Thanks TVPaint community for being there to support a newcomer.

Hi, Mgilpatrick ,

Welcome to the forum.

Which version of TVPaint do you have ?

What resolution should my background drawings be? Will 72 dpi become fuzzy if shown on a big theater screen? Is 200 or 300 dpi overkill?

DPI really only has reference to printing images. All images displayed on a computer screen are 72 dpi . (this has been discussed several times on the forum , search for it) What we are really interested in is RESOLUTION in terms of pixels . 3840 x 2160 original project size with an output of 1920 x 1080 should be plenty of resolution to keep everything looking sharp.

If you're going to zoom in very close on the artwork (say, going from equivalent of a "12 Field" to a "4 Field" in traditional animation terms, if you know what I mean) you would want to work at two - to - three times the resolution of the intended output. (moving in as close as equivalent to "5 field" or "4 field" , I'd be safe and work at 3x the intended output resolution)

-- For scenes that don't have camera moves is it best to use the full drawing area (3840 x2160) or the size of the camera view (1920 x 1080)?

For scenes with no camera movement you would be fine to work at the intended output resolution of 1920 x 1080 . However , even with no camera movement , you may want to overscale it a bit ... in TVPaint Pro you can create a New Project With Camera View , which allows you to set the amount of overscale ... 120% - 150% - 200% - whatever it may be. As a general rule I will work 150% - 200% over the intended final resolution , so if I have to do any transforming (rotating /scalings images) or camera moves, the line quality will be sharp when it is exported to the final resolution.
So for 1920 x 1080 , if you set the overscale for 120% , your project size would be 2304 x 1296 , which would still give you a little bit of wiggle room if you needed to adjust the framing on the artwork.

-- These backgrounds are line drawings. Should I leave the background drawings transparent or add a color fill layer in Photoshop? Is there a way to add a color fill layer in TVPaint, similar to the way I can in Photoshop?

Well, you can actually draw the backgrounds directly in TVPaint, but if you choose to draw them in Photoshop first , leave them as transparent line drawings . If you work with transparency in a PNG or TIFF format , you can import the background drawings in to TVPaint and the transparency is preserved . If you add a background fill color (white) behind the line drawings in Photoshop then you should run the SCAN CLEANER FX on the line art when it's imported to TVPaint , to turn it transparent. But that's not necessary if your original art in Photoshop is transparent and is saved as PNG or TIFF , then imported into TVPaint . (the transparency will be preserved).

Is there a way to add a color fill layer in TVPaint, similar to the way I can in Photoshop?

Yes, absolutely. You have several options. You could just create a new layer underneath the line art layer and use the Paintbucket (flood fill) to fill it in https://www.tvpaint.com/doc/tvp11/index ... -floodfill

... or if you wanted fill specific areas of the background line art with different shades of grey or different colors, you could use the CTG layer. See:

https://www.tvpaint.com/doc/tvp11/index ... pplication


(this shows filling in a line drawing with flat colors via the CTG coloring method , but of course you could also paint a fully rendered BG over the line art layer using other paint tools in TVPaint)

https://www.tvpaint.com/doc/tvp11/index ... ctg-basics

-- I'm getting an error message when I try to import a background. What is the correct png profile?

Yes, there is some issue with certain old PNG formats with ICC Profile sRGB ... if you search the forum you can read about it. Someone uploaded a Photoshop Action which allows for exporting PNGs from Photoshop that will have the correct profile to load in TVPaint with no error message. See this topic: http://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9947

And: https://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=9955

-- Is there a way to link to a background image or do I have to import it? I'm a little wary about using the image library since it appears that they store on my computer, and I would rather that storage take place on my RAID.

I believe the BG image can be a sourced "dependency" (from another file) , but unless it's a really gigantic file I'd advise you to just import it in to TVPaint as a transparent layer (or if it has a white background run the scan cleaner on the BG line art , which will make it transparent ) so it is saved as a Dependency within the the project ( Project menu > Embed Dependencies in Project)

Thank you D.T.!

I'm very grateful for your quick response and the amount of information you provided. You have helped me get unstuck.

To answer your question about which version of TVPaint I am working in, I am using the Pro version and updated to 11.0.3 a few weeks ago. My project was created with camera, 1920 x 1080 output size, overscaled to 200%.

I understand that resolution doesn't apply in TVPaint, But I thought it might apply to the backgrounds drawn in Photoshop. It sounds like using a 72 dpi resolution for my 3480 x 2160 pixel backgrounds will do just fine.

Thanks for pointing me to the discussion with the Photoshop action zip file. I downloaded it, ran it on my backgrounds, and I don't get error messages anymore. Now that I can import pngs transparency,! I can't wait to try the flood fill. I will also try making my imported images dependencies.

I'm not familiar with the terms like "12 Field" "5 Field," "4 Field" from traditional animation, but will do some research. I believe all of my questions have been answered. I'm sure I will have more questions as I get deeper into the project.

You don't work with DPI here, you just calculate everything with the correct pixel dimensions.

If your project size is 1920 x 1080px (HDTV), any image of that size will be good enough in terms of line quality. However, I found that adding some 100px or more around this allows me for better painting (if I create directly in TVP). You'll find lots of examples of other people's films where you can spot tiny white lines or other mistakes around the border of the frame, which tells you they painted int in a HDTV file. It's the same as with working on paper: you need to be able to continue the brush strokes outside the frame.

For zooming in it's simple: the most extremely enlarged area still must be 1920 x 1080 - everything else just follows from that.

I recommend to organise your workflow a bit like this: BG paint files - just for colouring your Backgrounds - and animation files - into which you will import the finished Backgrounds. At any point in time you can easily replace artwork, in fact I work back and forth a lot, like exporting from the animation project back into the BG project, but with one frame of animaton, to maybe adjust some BG detail or colouring.

*some precision about vocabulary*

Definition is a value in pixels. The more you get pixels, the higher the definition is. That's why we say "High Definition" or "HD" .

Resolution should be used when you want to apply a value on a distance. It requires 2 elements, usually pixels or dots on inches or centimeters.
In other words, when you print, you precise the number of dots per inch (DPI). If you say "my project is 15" x 7" in 300 DPI", your project definition will be 4500 pixels x 2100 pixels. If you don't plan to print your work, it's not necessary to think about DPI.
You can also say "Resolution" to talk about your screen definition (for instance, FullHD, which is 1920 x 1080 pixels) depending on your monitor size in inches (27", for instance). In that case, you can talk about PPI (pixels per inches).
In example, a 15" monitor with a 4K definition (3840 x 2160 pixels) will have a better resolution than a 27" monitor with a FullHD definition.

mgilpatrick wrote: ↑05 Mar 2017, 03:43 I'm not familiar with the terms like "12 Field" "5 Field," "4 Field" from traditional animation, but will do some research. I believe all of my questions have been answered. I'm sure I will have more questions as I get deeper into the project.

Honestly, it's probably not that important if you are working all digitally in TVPaint (and Photoshop). It's irrelevant to working digitally. If you were working partially on paper and scanning the drawings to TVPaint it would still be relevant , but not if your production pipeline is all paperless. That's just the way I tend to think of framing scenes and calculating camera moves , because I came up through traditional pencil-on-paper animation. The "fields" refer to the camera view . Standard animation paper was (is) 12 Field . As the camera moves in closer it can go down to 11 field, 10 field , 9 field , and so forth , down to around 4 field which was the practical limit for pencil drawn artwork ...

If you're interested , here's some information regarding this arcane terminology:

https://filmmakingstuffs.blogspot.com/2 ... sizes.html

http://www.awn.com/animationworld/anima ... d-labeling

TVPaint actually does have a standard 12 Field overlay in the Guidelines Panel , for those who still use such things.

slowtiger wrote: ↑05 Mar 2017, 09:32
For zooming in it's simple: the most extremely enlarged area still must be 1920 x 1080 - everything else just follows from that.

Yes, that's a good way to calculate the size of your artwork for a camera zoom. You can see it in these two examples:

Example 1 - original size of project 1920 x 1080 , zoom-in from equivalent "12 Field" to equivalent "4 Field" . Output to 1920 x 1080.
You can see the image go soft as the camera zooms in closer.

Example 2 - original size of project is 7096 x 2034 (almost 4x intended output of 1920 x 1080.)
zoom-in from equivalent "12 Field" to equivalent "4 Field" . Output to 1920 x 1080.
Both end up the same output size (1920 x 1080) , and at the start both are equally sharp, however
Example 2 with the higher definition retains the image sharpness over the entire duration of the zoom-in.
(click on embedded images to see them larger)

The difference in image sharpness is more apparent on the two attached movie files viewed full size on your monitor:

I think I just discovered another solution to avoiding an ICC error -- Photoshop CC 2017 allows you to export a PNG without the profile and without converting it to sRGB. When you use "Export As," the files settings allow you to uncheck both the Convert to sRGB and Embed Color Profile boxes.