PD Pro 7 ?

   

PD Pro 7.0 Howler was first released in late December 2011. It continues as a work in progress, with an ever expanding list of new features that are being added.

Version 7.1 (aka "Carrot Juice") was released January 31st 2012. It is a free update for users of v7.0.

Version 7.2 (aka "Hobs and Jills") is here. It is a free update for users of v7 and 7.1. Here's a brief summary of what's new in 7.2:

• Multi-monitor support
• New user interface style and colors
• Motion prediction module
• Re-invented timeline editor
• More options in 3D Designer animation
• Faster loading of image sequences
• Broader file format support for compositing
• Broader use of SSE2 and threading
• More options in enhanced curve tool: B-Spline toggle

Here are just a few of the hottest new features we've added in 7.1:

• Rotoscoping to change video content
• Image stabilization and improved motion tracking
• Antialiasing of drawing tools
• New Color Curve Tool
• Greatly enhanced Curve tool
• Faster Timeline
  

And here is a brief recap of some of the many great things that started 7.0:

• 3D Designer
  
• Quick Color Picker
• Filter: Adjust all
  
• Orbicles (orbiting particle brushes)
• 3D API for software developers
• Smooth Scaling mode for zooming
  

Ready for more?

Here's an example of artwork done by Leaftracker, using just the simplest of internal brushes, no layers, no fancy extra features. Dogwaffle can do that and a lot more. Look for more examples here soon.


We are continuing to show new capabilities here from combining the new with the old, so be sure to come back again for another look. For example, when using Mirror mode (old) with the 3D Designer (new). See some examples here, amongst other features such as Orbicles:

3D is pervasive, it's coming everywhere. So is video. PD Pro enables the fusion of visual art including 3D and video with still images and sophisticated brushes.

Here's what's particularly new and noteworthy in PD Pro 7 Howler:
 

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What's new in v7.1?  

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Welcome to Project  "Carrot Juice"

Here is a list of new features and enhancements included with PD Pro Howler version 7.1.

Note: Changes to the architecture in version 7 are now allowing us to move forward on a number of things we've wanted to do for years.  This is a very ambitious non-integer update.  version 7.1, codenamed "Carrot Juice", introduces a number of these features:

• Greatly enhanced Curve tool: Roto tools, better editing, Alpha add/Subtract, Anti-aliasing, ....and much more - see here for details

• Roto Curves: There is now a set of tools for basic rotoscoping and creating
  v7.1: Tracking Mattes
  
  traveling garbage mattes (tracking mattes).  This will be useful to those desktop filmmakers who need to touch up greenscreen work by eliminating parts of sets or other objects, or for creating a matte where greenscreen wasn't employed at all.  There's also a tool that will take a shot at automating the process.  Results will vary depending on the image sequence in question.  Roto curves can also be used for matting and picking up an animated brush, and probably other creative uses. This one is fresh out of the lab.... We're still  discovering just what kind of a beast we created here. Since Rotoscoping can be an intensive process, this may not be the best choice for users who need to do large amounts of heavy duty rotoscoping.  We're a "Burn-and-go" bitmap editor.  That sort of work would be better left to project based applications that allow for going back in and tweeking and rerendering hundreds of times, when needed.  If you've got a compositing department, let them do it.  That's why they make the big bucks :)  On the other hand, this will probably be well suited for those who need to clean up an image sequence, or do some weekend film making, etc.  Hey, let's make a movie, folks!

• Animated filters:
  
• A new animated filter lets you merge all frames through the alpha(!) without going to the timeline. What you merge is the Swap buffer's image and the Main buffer, i.e. the current frame of the animation. The Swap buffer can also be an animation, through a designated .dwa (dogwaffle animation) file.
  

• You can also fill the selection using the current fill style for every frame automatically. It too uses the alpha channel to determine which parts of the image gets to be affected by the fill tool and which parts are not.
  

• Stroke the brush along an animated(!) Path of the Curve tool. The enhanced Curve tool lets you key frame the curve. The changing shapes of that curve can be used as a path for the brush to be rendered along.

• Anti-aliasing of drawing tools.
  

• Curve Tool  Editing Enhancements: There are some enhancements to curve editing too.  You can now move existing points while still in add (insert) mode, as well as add points anywhere in the curve (not just at the end).  Antialiasing is optional for filled curves and curves applied to the alpha channel.  The polygon mode is now respected by the fill and alpha options.  There are now replace/add/subtract options for applying the filled curve to the alpha, which can be used to make much more sophisticated shapes by combining curves.

• A 'repair dropout' feature replaces the imagery in a selection with that from a previous frame, which can be useful for repairing video dropout from old video tapes.

• The functions that were handled by the Graphics Server are now internalized and the Graphics Server has thus been removed, which among other things allows for faster startup.

• Anti-aliasing: The circle tool, lasso tool, and curve tools now support optional anti-aliasing.

• Lasso selections: There's a new spline mode for the lasso tool.

• Quick color picker: First introduce in v7.0, we've made further enhancements to it. There are some refinements to the quick color picker.  There's now a Slider for saturation and quick access to pigment profiles. As before, you access the quick color picker while painting simply by pressing and holding the SPACEBAR.
  

• There's a new color curve editor in the Adjust group of filters.

• Revamped motion tracking: There is now faster and more precise motion tracking.\

• Brush keyframer: we've made enhancements to the brush keyframer:  Alpha support was added, i.e. if a mask is present in the alpha channel, it will be noticed and used in the keyframer too. (this is immense!)

• Loading of AVI video files is now faster in certain cases. Also, Loading avis no longer show a preview of what it's loading while it loads, but it should therefore load a lot faster especially if you use a codec that decodes quickly and the overhead centers on display refresh.

• The Value-only contrast filter (contrast of the value channel only) had a weird internal/external dependency issue that could result in a deadlock, so it's been given a rewritten panel.

• the Store_BrushAsBuffer_pm.exe plugin may not have been included with the 7 distro. (included now for sure)

• Image Stabilizer: Stabilization of animation frames and motion removal.

• Animated Swap buffer from Animation file: Animated swap buffer is being moved from the timeline out into the main program. It is still also available in the Timeline editor, but not exclusively. There are some filters in the Filter menu or options in the Image menu that can benefit from this as they use the Swap buffer already, now also with animated alternative from a .dwa file.
  

• Feedback: There were several areas where the user could become confused because there was no hourglass indicating that the app was busy, such as cropping and saving animations.

• Selective Copying: There is a new copy/paste behavior.  Previously copying with CTRL-C would copy the entire image, but now it will copy the selection if there is one, otherwise it will copy the entire image as usual.  You do not NEED to make a selection to use CTRL C.

• Copying a custom brush to the clipboard was previously handled through a plugin and has been internalized. 
  

• Added Dog_SaveBrushToBMP to the plugin interface. This is for programmers who wish to add their plugins to Dogwaffle through the free SDK.
  

• The Time Slice by Alpha was added late in 7.0, if you hadn't notice it, so it's worth mentioning here again. It creates funky distortions along the timeline based on values found in the alpha channel. Anyway, it's still there now, and it's fun. There will be tutorials.

• Filmstrip overhaul: for speed improvements with anything that's animation related, the Timeline, etc. Also an attempt to reduce flickering with roto-curves.

• Retiming an animation: Retiming with frame blending should be much faster now

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What's new in v7.0?

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• There is now a smooth scaling mode for zooming.

• Regular zooming is much faster.

• Major! The Wireframe designer has been renamed the 3D Designer and greatly(!) enhanced.  It now uses the internal 3D API and is much(!) faster.  Many additional features have been added. See sneak previews and examples here and also in our Youtube channel
  

• Hot! There is a new quick color picker accessed by pressing the space bar.  It is dubbed "The Quicker Color Picker" by the beta team.

• Using the adjust value filter would interfere with the histogram panel.

• The context strip for the paint bucket did not have an opacity slider so you had to go to the fill settings panel.  That has been added.

• The fill tools and drawing tools such as line/box and circle, now operate in real time (with immediate feedback showing the result as you go).
  

• Hot! There's a new color filter called Adjust All based on a color matrix.  The idea is to allow a number of color adjustments all from the same panel at the same time.

• There is now the option to store a brush as an image instead of a brush.

• There is now the ability to crop an animated brush.

• Available memory was previously calculated incorrectly on 64 bit systems on the animation control panel. (fixed)
  

• There's now a memory bar to show the amount of available physical memory. (e.g. when creating a new animation)
  

• Hot! 3D API improvements.  (There's a lot of work that goes into those 3 little words.)

• Interface tweaks.  Things like "Explore temp directory" being changed to "Explore temp folder" because they're generally called Folders in Windows and that's what people are probably familiar with.

• CTRL-V has a new option to paste into a new custom brush.

• There's a new plugin to render particle confetti.

• Clearing the fill settings with the quick clear button now adds the option to also clear the paper texture settings.

• While paper texture can still be toggled on the "icon" tab on the sidebar, there's now a quick button to clear all paper texture settings.

• The Batch Browser now has a context menu that lets you select the various functions, and "Path to clipboard" and "Explore" are added as options.

• Fixed a bug where the Batch Browser would not show images in some cases (e.g. if their extension was not lowercase - and often times, the pictures from a digital camera would indeed be in uppercase).

• Changes to animation control panel.  The panel is now on a bar across the top or bottom (switchable).
  

• There's now an option to delete the recently used files list.

• There's now an option to set the default jpeg quality level.(in Window->Settings...)
  

• Sizzling Hot! (and... drum roll please!) Introducing Orbicles! A new tab was added to the particle brush panel: Orbicles. These are orbiting particles that mimic a swarming set of bees or termites (either way, you'll want to get out of the way), animated and contained in a shaped region (cube, sphere, torus,...), flying around the center of the mouse - in 3D(!), and leaving their mark in form of interesting new trails. Our first incarnation of 3D brushes, yeaeeh!! To probe further:  [screenshot]  [intro video #1] 
  

• Hot! Running on Windows 8 - looking goooooood! We've installed Windows 8 on an old netbook (the one we used for development of PD Pro 5 last year - yep, that's already an old netbook ;-) and it works rather well. It's exciting to know that some future tablet devices with stylus, powered by Windows 8, should be able to run PD Pro 7 very well.

• The dwa (Dogwaffle Animation) format now supports frame rate.  The way it works is the same as before for an old file.  If you load an old file, it just uses the current frame rate, but if you load a new file created since PD Pro 7, then it uses the frame rate from the file as the initial (default) playback frame rate. Of course, thereafter you can still also change the rate to other values to view it slower or faster.
  
  
  The story of why there was no frame rate in the file...
  
  In the old days of PC's, there were no high performance timers, and thus timing was limited to a fidelity of about 1/18th of a second, sketchy at best, certainly not great for animation playback, and thus frame rate never went into the original file format.
  
  That, or it was originally just intended as a working format to store a sequence of lossless frames in one convenient file dump and not as a final playback format.
  

• New Size Presets: there are additional popular preset sizes such as 360p, HDTV 720p when creating a new document or changing the size (menu: Image > Resample). See example
  

• Working with physical and dpi reality: In the same size setting dialog, there is now also a unit calculator tool to help you convert physical dimensions and DPI to the actual number of pixels needed. It will tell you how many pixels that is for 72 dpi, 150dpi, 300 dpi (default) or any other value, really, whichever you enter. See examples
  

• When pasting an image from the Clipboard using Ctrl+V, you now have an additional option:  
• paste the image into the current image  
  
• replace the existing image with a new one 
  
• paste into a new (custom) brush ^new!

        Click here for an example

• We have added a 3D SDK for programmers. If you are a developer who already has a great application that could benefit from a connection to PD Pro (running at the same time - see examples of standalone or plugin apps here), then we highly recommend you take a look at the free SDK and especially the new 3D capabilities.

• Cosmetic changes  to the Keyframer, Exposure Sheet, Batch Processor, Histogram to the newer style.

• The Twirl transform filter (menu: Filter > Transform > Twirl) has a new checkbox option "more twirl" to switch to a mode with more twirl.
  

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