Advice on size and quality of video/animation

[deefadog]

Hi all, A client has asked me to include a short video of a person walking on the screen and doing several interactions, like picking up the logo, kicking a ball etc. I am planning on shooting the video of a person against a white wall, so to eleminate as much background as possible, as the background of the website will be white also.

What i am after is any advice, tips and best settings to get good quality video with a sensible Kb size.

Here's what i have so far from other threads, capture the video and save it as a quicktime file, then import the quicktime file into flash, then have each seperate video as an MC an I can add the ineratcions within these.

Is this all there is to it?

Now apart from compression, is there any other way to cut the size down, monochrome or b/w maybe?

Any advice from anyone who has done this before would be a great help.

Flash 5 btw

Thanks

deef


__________________

[flakedb]

I am not sure if you can export out of to flash 5 if you import things using sorenson but the .flv formatt will greatly reduce your file size than importing straight in from quicktime (totally uncompressed). alsobe sure to light the white background really well so it is totally over exposed this is the only way to make it totally white. this will save you much time in post.
_db

[deefadog]

Yeah The over exposure of the background is a good tip!

I am importing the video into flash as a series of images, so video codecs etc is not really an issue now!

I guess the real question is what image format gives the best quality and lowest file size!

Thanks

[jcolletti]

I've had to do several of these interactive video thingies with flash here at work...In my experience, the best video for smallest file size and clarity when published from flash is black and white. if you can work that into the design the amount of file size you save is substantial.

[deefadog]

Thanks jcolletti, yeah b&w would work fine, I am trying to get a siloutte effect of the person and then maybe turn it in to vector! Not how to do this yet but I'll have a go, should knoeck the file size right down.

Thanks

[dobby]

Turning in to vector is an exellent idea. So you can use just one image for background.
I've used this way one time for banner with 3-d animation. I've reduced about 60% of the file's size.:)

[webguy]

anyone seen a tut on this? I'd like more info. What kinda equipment should I look into? Have to price it out for the suits.

webG

[deefadog]

Check this site out (probably seen this before) - http://www.triplandesign.com

This is the effect my client wants, work really well!

Hope somone knows of a tut on this

Cheers

[CyanBlue]

Hey, what's up??? :D

That given link is not accessible to me... Don't know why...

Maybe you might have checked this one out already and maybe this is not really what you are looking for, but the WildForm makes Flix products that you might want to take a look at...
http://www.wildform.com/

[deefadog]

Hi Mr Blue, good to see you again :)

Strange, the link should work, i have tested it, o well :)

Anyway, yes I have Flix and you can process a video into vector, but you got to get the background really white for it to work. I am working on it and I'll post the results, amybe I'll post the custom settings also so it's easy for other people who have Flix to use!

We need to investigate this thread alot more I think, seems to be no tuts or any experienced flashers who have done this!

Cheers

[Xenozip]

Originally posted by webguy
anyone seen a tut on this? I'd like more info. What kinda equipment should I look into? Have to price it out for the suits.

webG Well, there is a tutorial on this site for Video to Vector Animation (http://www.actionscript.org/tutorials/intermediate/Video_to_Vector_Animation/index.shtml).

Generally speaking, you'll need some kind of bluescreen (or white) for background, and overexpose the screen with lighting so that it's much easier to grab the image(s) you want.

You'll need equipment of corse for capturing video onto your comp. Believe it or not, most webcams today have a high enough quality for doing the basic of capturing video and converting into vector graphics, but any outdated web-cam technology would porbably be a waste of money since often their feed is blurry and/or pixelated, and have poor zoom/focus features.

Thus, the cost of equipment is usually relative to the return. A high end (and expensive) digital camera with usb connectivity might be quite a leap away from a webcam as far as $ goes, but it does make life easier and quality tends to improve.

You'll also need to check out the cost for additional equipment like a camera stand (assuming the camera doesn't come with one), additional mirror or reflective equipment to enhance lighting on particular areas (for showing negative or positive shadow).

And for software, there's lots and lots of different proggies that port video and let you manipulate backgrounds and colors. I don't personally have it, but IIRC my friend was telling me that Lightwave is the best for this.

You should check out ebay and priceline for equipment, and remember to do lots of research on lightning because being able to overexpose the backdrop is very important, especially if you're working with a low-quality camera or a particularly dark in-door enviornment.

As for service charges, well.. I don't know >.<
Maybe check out some other small businesses on the net to see if they offer those types of services, then find out what they charge. Google. :o

[deefadog]

Thanks Xenozip, great info.


That tut is where I am right now! but thanks, at least I was doing it the right way! :)


I am getting there with Flix, which converts the video directly to vector and saves it as an .swf, which saves alot of time!

As I mentioned in the above thread I'll post the flix settings file when I get it right! :)

Cheers

[deefadog]

Go here http://www.realitydesigns.co.uk/vectortest/kick.html

The html will apear blank for a little while until it has loaded, to lazy to add a loader :)

This was 168k in size and consists of 70 frames of vector in flash.

I used flix to convert it to vector and imported it as an importable .swf.

Then just deleted unwanted bits directly from flash.

This is still not as good as I would like, but it's a start! I'll keeo you all posted on beeter tests!

let me know what you think!

Cheers

Deef

[Xenozip]

Well, there's another few methods you could try..

One way is to decrease the color depth of each frame down to something like 12 colors or less. If you *really* over-exposed to background then you could decrease it to 2 or 3 colors. That might perserve the edges better..

Another method would be to import everything into flash and use the trace bitmap option. You would have to play around with the settings a lot before they were just right, but doing that might flatten the image and cut out the edges (or make the background easy to delete)..

Personally, I think it looks cool like it is. But it's a bit detailed. More detail is hard to work with and makes it look choppy. If you can reduce it down to 2 or 3 colors, then that would probably look best. The only thing would be to keep the outline smooth.

The first time I tried anything like this, I used my friends web-cam (mine is too oldschool/outdated to get any good shots from it). Next, I used Jasc paint shop pro and Jasc animation shop pro. I then decreased the ammount of colors in each frame down to 2, which essentially make the background all white and the figure all black.

This was diffacult to do at first because it wouldn't retain the outline how it was supposed to be. So I ended up having to decrease it to 16 colors and then modify it, then to 12 colors and modify it, and so on till it was down to 2 colors.

This is why over-exposing the background is so important. If you do that you can just decrease the image down directly to 2 colors with a fair ammount of outline accuracy.

Photoshop has some great image enhancing tools as well that can improve the outline accuracy before decreasing the color count. And another option would be to modify the palette, if you know what the background colors are then you could swap those out with fullbright colors and then decrease the color depth..

Using Flash to trace the bitmaps is all well and good, but if you don't get the settings perfect for each one then you get that blocky/choppy look. That look is actually kinda cool sometimes, but I guess it depends on what you're intending to do/make.

[dobby]

I've seen here tutorials about video to vector animation and other things about this.
I wonder how to avoid permanent looping points in the contour.
For example if I use sequence of png it works great, but it increases file size.
I don't know: is it possible to keep line of the silhouette stable?

[deefadog]

Thanks for the tips there Xenozip I have tried with bringing in each frame to photoshop and messing with the mode - bitmap settings and can get some nice edges! will post another test when i get the time - it is very time consuming stuff! but once I get the desired effect it should not take too long to replicate!

Cheers

[dobby]

Could you explaine theese tricks?
:rolleyes: