Reggiefoto,
Now, does anyone know of a plug in or other software that will register each frame individually to make rotoscoping easier?
I don’t have the latest version of Photoshop, so I can’t verify this, but I would think that Photoshop itself would give the option of saving a Filmstrip FLM file as individual numbered images.
If not, Corel Painter 8 (and Painter 7) both allow you to open an AVI file as a "Frame Stack" FRM file (a Corel format analogous to Adobe’s FLM) and you can operate on individual frames of the frame stack or apply operations to the entire video clip simply by applying a script to the framestack clip. Painter does let you advance through the clip and paint on each frame individually if you wish. But when I am painting on an individual frame I usually have the Capture Script On so that, when I get something that I like, I can Undo what I did on that frame and apply that script to the entire Frame Stack. Painting on individual frames is usually too tedious for my liking. But Corel Painter lets you do rotoscoping and more to your video with a powerful arsenal of artistic tools that you can apply frame-by-frame, or globally to the entire video clip, or any combination of the two.
Painter also lets you save the frame stack to an automatic sequence of individually numbered bitmaps (you can choose from several bitmap formats) which can be opened in other bitmap editors like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and operated on there. Later, Painter can reopen those numbered bitmaps automatically in sequence to recreate the frame stack as it was altered in the other application(s). And you can come full circle in Painter by saving the Frame Stack as a new AVI file for use back in your video editor (in my case, Sonic Foundry’s Vegas.)
For some reason Corel has not publicized Painter’s video capabilities much. Perhaps because, as you have done with the Adobe FilmStrip format in Photoshop, it is easy to exceed the resources of an application with video. That is particularly easy to do in Painter because when you open an AVI into a Frame Stack, the AVI is uncompressed and each frame is a 640 x 480 24-bit color bitmap occupying 1.2MB. The mere act of opening an AVI in Painter can cause a big surge in virtual memory requirements on your system. For that reason, I operate on relatively short clips in Painter, on the principle that you can break sticks one at a time when you can’t break the whole bundle of sticks.
As I alluded, Painter’s video capabilities border on being awesome. Although Photoshop has made great progress with its painting capabilities, Painter continues to be dominant artistically. But I have combined the best of both worlds simply by creating a shortcut in my Painter’s Plugins folder pointing to my Photoshop’s Plug-Ins folder. That makes nearly all of Photoshop’s plug-ins and filters directly available inside Painter. There are a few exceptions, like Xaos Tools’ Segmation plugin, which works only in my Photoshop 5.0.2. When I want to apply Segmation to some video, I have to export to Photoshop and back.
I can’t afford Adobe’s Premiere and After Effects at the moment, but for the time being Sonic Foundry’s Vegas Video, Photoshop, and Corel Painter are working very well together.
— Burton —
