I’m not saying that the video should also have sound input capabilities (I’m sure the developers are already trying their best there), and I’m also not saying that there aren’t any workarounds currently (I can simply divide the video into PNGs and import), but it’d actually be cool if Synfig was capable of importing video no matter what codec, because that would actually make it an awesome, free composting tool.
Thing is, a couple of days back I showed my mates a video showing how realistic muzzle flares could be made. Apparently the tutorial was about After Effects, and although it could be done in almost any other software (like Synfig and Blender) my friends said that it’s the easiest in AE compared to any opensource solutions. Blender is a bit “complicated”, I can understand, but the only thing keeping Synfig back is, well, you guessed it.
So I asked myself: why not make a simple tutorial for people and help them composite home videos without the need of spending cash on things like Vegas and AE? But I’d like to do it solely on Synfig, without depending on any other tool.
EDIT: Another thought: We already have masking capabilities, but is it possible to have masking/effects “inside” some other layer, similar to Photoshop and GIMP? So that it only affacts that specific layer?
Also, I’d like to know if that bug I mentioned (disconnected bline bug) is fixed? Sorry, haven’t tried Synfig for a while now (was busy with Blender and Maya for the time) so I lost track.
Regarding to the feature requests (full video support) I totally agree. It just need someone that implements it.
What’s wrong with the current paste canvas layer and its limitation of the masking effect?
With a mask with a single layer you can do one mask operation, but what if you want to use the masked result into other masking operation? At the end you need some sort of node connections (like blender or ramenhdr) to create complex masking, and the way that Synfig computes the masking (encapsulation) is some similar.
Can you please point me to the bug tracker or where the bug is described?
Genete, would it be possible for Synfig to automatically break a video into frames when trying to import? Say, you’re trying to import an MKV, but instead of importing the video as whole Synfig tries to break it down into frames and then, making an LST file, imports the frames automatically?
As for the single layer thing, it’d actually be awesome to have a node editor in Synfig, but seeing as we can’t have it yet let’s focus simple. Thing is, I’m still confused about the last time you said on how to let a certain effect alter only one layer and not the ones below it. For instance, you have an image, you wanna “noise” that image, but you wanna warp the “noise”, not the image. Just an example. Because if we encapsulate the Noise, it wouldn’t affect the bottom layer.
circle, etc
AVI file imported directly from my camera (composite blend)
Circles are animated to track the kids’ movements, and the whole video is reformatted from 4:3 to 16:9
Rendered directly from Synfig to mpeg2.
I keep thinking we should do a video compositing challenge, but I wanted to have the time to do an entry myself, and I’ve been really short on time recently. There’s a lot you can do with Synfig, and not much you can’t.
Thanks, pixelgeek! Tried the uncompressed AVI import thing and it worked (well, almost; needed a bit of tweaking).
You can check it out here. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2354
Tried the uncompressed AVI import thing and it worked (well, almost; needed a bit of tweaking).