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I have a student who is using TVPaint to make his thesis film , but his time is running short and he needs to enlist help from others to help color his characters. (since this is relatively easy click & fill work that can be passed off to others, allowing him to concentrate on animating ) He can not afford to purchase additional licenses of TVPaint for his helpers and the other people who have agreed to help him color already have Photoshop ... so , he wants to export cleaned-up line art from TVPaint as PNG image sequences (with transparency) so those image sequences can be imported to Photoshop for flood fill coloring by his helpers, then he will re-import the colored PNG image sequences to TVPaint to composite with his Backgrounds and add camera moves.

What are the best settings for him to use when exporting line art from TVPaint as a PNG image sequence to be flood-fill colored in Photoshop ?

Based on some searching around in the forum I believe these settings would be correct for exporting PNG image sequences with transparency :

Export As > Sequence
Format > PNG
Mode > RGBA
Alpha > Premultiply
Compression > lossless (10)
Resolution 1920 x 1080
Uncheck Background

OR should he export the line art from TVPaint Export tab Clips Layers Structure as .PSD format ?

Saving the colored images from Photoshop should he save those as .PNG (any particular settings from Photoshop ?) or save the colored images as .PSD format to re-import the images back into TVPaint ?

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I just can speak for myself, but before TVP11 I used exactly this process and settings to color my drawings. So to me it looks fine.
If your student uses TVP11 he should maybe try the "Export All Images and Layers into Folders"-button in the "Handy Custom Panel" under "Miscellaneous", it makes the whole process maybe a tiny bit faster.

Use those exact same settings you had.
PNG, not PSD. RGBA, background unchecked, but alpha NOT premultiplied,
believe it or not. That way you get the nicest quality png's and the alphas / colors will be correct.

Thank you schwarzgrau and CartoonMonkey .

You're welcome and sorry, CartoonMonkey is right, I always get confused with the pre-multiply settings. That's one of the reasons this new button comes in pretty handy.

Related to this topic, another student asks:

"My question is about compiling the final film. I need to know the best way to compile and export the finished color images from TVPaint while retaining the best image quality, with highest color fidelity. Should I export all the individual scenes from TVPaint as AVI’s and put them together using Adobe Premiere , or export as Image Sequence (PNG) and open the image sequence in Adobe Premiere ? “

I'm interested in the collective experience of everyone here . How do you export your final color images from TVPaint to import to an editing program like Adobe Premiere , to retain the best image quality , with highest color fidelity ? --

. AVI (what settings ? Motion JPEG mode 100% or use RGBA or YUV ? )

OR Quicktime .MOV with lossless Apple Animation codec, Millions of Colors ?

OR export all frames as an Image Sequence ? (PNG , RGBA mode, as mentioned in previous post) .



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I always use MOVs with ProRess 422 for testing and PNG for the final sequence. It takes longer to write a PNG then single Video-frames, cause PNGs are compressed (but more like ZIP files then JPEGS) but they are pretty much losless, while retaining acceptable filesize.
And everybody and every software can read PNG sequences.

The only downsides are that you can't play an image-sequence and it's always possible to get one single corrupt PNG between all others and don't notice it till you're running out of time.

I use Quicktime with PNG codec for exchange between applications. If I detect a small mistake in the video editor, I render single frame PNGs.

I never thought about using the png codec. Are they the same quality and filesize than the corresponding image sequences?

I always export the animated shots with the AVI-internal settings to mode RGB (24bits).
Then import it in Adobe Premiere for editing and to keep a shot by shot oversight of the sequence.

When finished I do the final export from Premiere to either PNG or TARGA. Or another format if the client asks for it.

Basically the same as Sewie here, except that I use Sony Vegas for my NLE. I used to reduce my 1080 TVP clips to an intermediary 720p format which Vegas handled better, but after upgrading my graphics card I can now go directly to Vegas with 1080 and still maintain a steady preview rate in Best>Full quality. But when it comes to client delivery I always convert all my TVP clips directly to PNG image sequences instead of making the conversion in Vegas. I once had a filmout conversion lab test the two results; PNGs from Vegas and PNGs directly from TVP and was told that the TVP pngs were superior to the Vegas ones.

EDIT: When My Dog Tulip was released on DVD we came across a technical standards blogger who rated the color quality of every DVD released commercially and our movie got the highest rating available with a personal note from the blogger added to all the technical data about how unusually and exceptionally well our DVD performed.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:I once had a filmout conversion lab test the two results; PNGs from Vegas and PNGs directly from TVP and was told that the TVP pngs were superior to the Vegas ones.

What kind of superior?

Quicktime PNG codec and single PNG images are exactly the same, as far as I have tested.

was told that the TVP pngs were superior to the Vegas ones

I don't believe this. A PNG is either to spec, or it isn't a PNG at all.

Sandra and I could not see the difference when the lab showed us the two side by side, so I agree that there is for all practical purposes no difference, but then a technician showed us some readouts where the figures between the two were not the same. It's not so difficult for me to believe what we were told and shown because that's the nature of technicalities; some bests can be better than other bests -- what's so impossible about that?

Thank you all ! This is very informative and helpful. I will pass along the information.

Paul, I wanted to ask you about what you said regarding exporting to PNG image sequence:

Paul Fierlinger wrote: But when it comes to client delivery I always convert all my TVP clips directly to PNG image sequences instead of making the conversion in Vegas. I once had a filmout conversion lab test the two results; PNGs from Vegas and PNGs directly from TVP and was told that the TVP pngs were superior to the Vegas ones.
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When you export directly to PNG image sequence do you prefer to set the PNG to RGB (24 bits) or RGBA (32bits) ?

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