Project Resize and Cam in 10 - What The Hell! [Solved]

[Animark]

Hello,

I am referencing to the problems with the cam in TVP 9.5.18 when resizing a project and want to keep your cam settings staying alive:
http://www.tvpaint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4843" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Now I tested a comparable situation in TVP 10 and made a picture of the steps and the results.

a) I made a project at a size of 320 x 240 px. I drawn a "circleface" with the mechanical pen, sharp lines, no antialiasing. Then I used the cam tool to activate the cam, but didn't changed it's settings in any way. The picture shows the drawing at 400%.

b) I resized this project to a new size of 1600 x 1200 px. TVP 10 resizes the camera using it's zoom-settings - in this case from 100% to 500%. (In TVP 9.5.18 the cam wasn't resized what was detected as a bug. I am not sure if it was fixed in later updates). Now the drawing is a little bit blurry, but this is normal when upscaling a project to 500% like i did here. The View-size is set to 100%.

c) Now I wanted to have the cam view rendered to a picture in project size. The picture shows the result - a very blurry drawing at a size of 1600x1200 px.

(Sorry for the big attachement, but I wanted to show the problem in its original resolution.)

Let's imagine you are doing a storyboard/animatic in TVP, not thinking about final project resolution at this moment. You use the cam tool in some clips and finally come to an end. Now you want to animate your film. I like to split the storyboard now to different projects. Next I would resize the projects to the final resolution depending on the cam movements - where I have to zoom in, the project size becomes greater, where I have to pan, the project size becomes wider. And so on ...

But I want to keep my cam movements. I don't want to do them again. In TVP 9.5.. I have to do the cam movements again, cause the cam-frames are out of position after resizing the project. In TVP 10 the cam-frames stays on their correct positions, but the cam resized with the project only with it's zoom settings and kept the old project size as global cam parametres.

Am I totally wrong with my workflow? How do you plan your projects related to the project size and this cam restrictions? Yes, OK, you can do your cam work again

Thanks from Animark.

[Animark]

Lying on my bed, watching a criminal story and didn't find away from this problem I found a solution working with the cam when it's not moved. Just set the cam parametres to the new project size and then reset the zoom to 100%. This would work for my example, but if there are movements the zoom reset have to be done on every key of the cam. It would be more difficult if the cam zoom is changing while moving.

[Elodie]

Lying on my bed, watching a criminal story and didn't find away from this problem.

Hope you're not going to kill us

Loosing quality when changing the camera's size and zoom is normal. When changing parameters, pixels have to adapt to new format.
But well, maybe we can do something to improve the rendering =)

[Animark]

Hello Elodie,

the problem is not the fact, that you loose quality when rendering a camera zoom. That's normal for bitmap based projects.
The problem is, that you cannot use the cam movements after resizing a project. Even when you do an animation with fresh sharp lines on step b) of my project, the camera stays to it's zoom factor and you will loose the quality when rendering the camera. If you don't want this, you have to do the cam movements again. That's the point. It's not about a better rendering algorithm or something like that.

BTW: I have no intentions to kill you

[Elodie]

oh, okay, sorry if I have misunderstood you.

[Animark]

Hi Elodie, no problem!

At the moment I am not sure if there is anybody understands my post at all. In that case I could try to describe it with other words. For me, the cam thing is really an important problem and I am wondering if there is no feedback of other users as well. But I'll be patient ...

[ZigOtto]

... At the moment I am not sure if there is anybody understands my post at all ...

...
Am I totally wrong with my workflow? How do you plan your projects related to the project size and this cam restrictions? Yes, OK, you can do your cam work again

no, no need to do your cam work again, I think the part "wrong" in your workflow is the cam parameters :
start by setting the (final) cam size (1920x1080 as output in HD format for example), and don't change it in any way,
then play only with the Z (%) to fit its frame to your "reduced" project (the sketchy "StoryBoard" project),
so after a re-scaling, I mean when enlarging it again to its working full-size, the zoom will be modified, but not the cam size (staying at 1920x1080 pix).
I've no times to test it yet, but I think this should work (at least with any tvpa version from v9.2.20 and up.)

the only thing missing to me is an AntiAliasing option for the Camera Rendering (None/Low/Medium/Best).

[Animark]

Hi ZigOtto,

yes, that could work. I didn't thought in that way before, and ... wow, I am impressed of that idea. I will test it out the next days. Thank you a lot!

[Animark]

Hurray, it works! With one little restriction.

So, now I can say, when doing a storyboard turning later in an animatic and later be resized to the final project size (after the cam-work), you should define the final output resolution of the project in the global camera parametres from the beginning.

The little restriction is, that you have to define the cam parametres in every new clip you build, even if you don't need any camera movements. You can avoid this step by making one clip with the camera setup and copy it for every new clip you need. It is also possible to save the cam parametres and load them to every new clip from the camera command menue.

I would like to prefer a camera,that automatically scales it's parametres for the resolution when a project beeing resized, so you don't need to spend thoughts on the mentioned operations, but I am not sure if this would have some restrictions for other ways of project and camera work.

@ZigOtto: Thanks again for your hint. That really helped me getting out of this hell