Where TVP ends and AfterEffects begins?

[JQuinn]

Hello TVP land - I have a question about what creative tasks people tend to leave to After Effects.

For instance we are doing a scene with many characters. We have put the scene together (scanning in animation done on paper) created mattes and colour all in TVP. There is an over all camera move which we will do in After Effects but also there are animated elements within the scene that need resizing and positioning - It seems easier to do this in AfterEffects but just wonder how other people on this forum split the jobs between TVP and AfterEffects. Basically what jobs do people leave for the compositing in AfterEffects?

Also is AfterEffects the last port of call or do some people here take AfterEffects projects back into TVP ie using the 2 programmes hand in hand?

Thank you kind folk

Joanna

[slowtiger]

Usually I try to have all elements in a scene in correct size. If not, I do compositing in AnimeStudio since I don't use AfterFX.

I have brought back scenes into TVP after that occasionally, mostly to add some atmospheric brush work or something like that.

[schwarzgrau]

Like you do with this job I always use the camera in After Effects, cause you are way more flexible how and when it moves. My way of doing a panning shot is to really roughly sketch out the scene in TVPaint (sometimes only one large image, which contains everything, but most of the time a really really rough animation, with only some keyposes) and do the camera move in After Effects with this sketch first, to see how big my canvas needs to be and to get an roughly estimated motion.
After that I adjust the canvas size to fit my needs. Sometimes if I have to do a really tricky shot I export a png sequence or mov from my current TVPaint progress and feed it into the After Effects camera move again, to see if it still fits.
I can't remember reimporting something else than reference footage back from After Effects into TVPaint, since I never saw the need for it.

By the way if you did some nice camera move in TVPaint or need to do it in TVPaint, since you need to see the camera motion, while animating, you can export it to After Effects. Duduf (some script genius, which added some useful stuff to Mads After Effects script, together with Nathano) added some TVPaint Camera importer into his amazing DUIK plugin for After Effects. I never tried it, but I guess it could be handy. Page 64 from this user guide covers it.

[Jotha]

In my graduation film TADAIMA, I did everything in TVP (excpet the sound, of course, and final export in Adobe Premiere). I wanted to keep it streamlined and my experience was that the more applications were involved, the more complicated it got or things didn't turn out the way you wanted it. But I only used very simple camera moves. At some point I realised that the Muliplane Camera effect is sometimes more helpful then the camera tool.
Also, in the newest TVP update (just last week or so), there was an additional file added (AfterEffects Import TVPaint JSON, an AfterEffects script), which will allow you to import TVP projects that you have previously exported in JSON-format (export with layer structure). Haven't tried it yet so can't say much about it, but sounds like an intersting alternative to the AE_TVPAINT_EXP_IMP-plugin.