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Post Work with Project Dogwaffle
Using PD Pro Digital Painter (Project Dogwaffle 3)  for post work to add special FX to rendered 3D animations.

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Home of Dogwaffle

Introduction  |  Previews  |  Tutorials 


Introduction


The Original :
 SwampDog

This is the original movie that inspired us to experiment with post work and make a few tutorials on how to use PD Pro with it.

This and more outstanding 3D animations came out of Jack Whitney's talents:
 www.jwhitneystudio.com

You'll notice of course that the above clip is in Quicktime format. Project Dogwaffle can handle image sequences and AVI files, so we'll need to convert the Quicktime to either of these formats. We used the very affordably priced Quicktime Pro to convert the clip to an AVI file. Uncompressed we saved it to TrueColor (24-bit per pixel) format. Don't save it to the default TrueColor+, because it will otherwise have an opaque alpha layer over it. If you don't have the tools to convert the Quicktime version to AVI, grab one of them here below:

Original swampdog File, converted to AVI
(compression codec: Cinepak):

Zipped version: swampdog_avi.zip 1.95 MB (2,045,469 bytes) 
Iceows'd version: swampdog_avi.ice 1.79 MB - 1,879,784 bytes)


When you view the movie, you'll also notice that there are two distinct parts in the movie. We'll nickname them  "the Cave"  and  "the Jump".


In the following tutorials we will show how to

1. separate the Cave from the Jump back into two separate clips, using the editing tools of PD Pro
2. load a clip and apply a variety of special effects on it

Other tools that you might want to use in conjunction with such operations are Irfanview, VirtualDub,  Debugmode Wax (awesome!), AVIsynth and other great tools for video composition. These and many other tools are listed in our Links section.

For example, one thing we'll attempt is to add a bit of rising air bubble action. Or, some turbulence when swinging the arms and jumping,and more bubbles which follow the jumping character as it swims away,  or additional camera action like pan and zoom to focus on particular item of interest such as the little fish peeking into the cave. We can also think of adding nopise, old film look, mystic vision, light diffusion, motion blur and much much more. Much (but not all) of the work will be done through applying filters with the Timeline editor.




Preview of Special FX

Below is an overview of some of the resulting transformations and alterations we'll discuss.

click the movies to toggle on/off
Flash MX player 6 or better recommended





1 - here we've added some snowfall. The image was turned upside-down first, so that after turning it back right-side up later the snowfall appears like bubbles rising.


2 - here we also added wave distortions


5 - an animated fish-eye view was added here


9 - remapping of the colors against a colormap of greyscale values was added here, as well as a video lines effect and fade-in from black at the start as well as fade out to black at the end.






Tutorials

Ready to jump in?   If you don't have a version of Project Dogwaffle or PD Pro yet, you can get the free Demo/trial version for evaluation.


Let's see the tutorials:    
  1. Loading and dissecting an AVI file  
  2. Special FX with the Timeline Editor
  3. Advanced Timeline: Keyframes


click image for larger view at 1024x768 pixels:
Notice that the Animation control panel is in Filmstrip mode,
displaying the thumbnails of frames. In the Timeline editor,
 we have selected the Snowfall effect here.