you can fly!?

Blue Screen Compositing
using video of a running man rendered in Poser with blue background,
and combining it with another animated background made in PD Pro
more tutorials:
PD Pro
more PD
PD Particles
   part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4  

Part 3: Correcting the position of one Frame
Below are the first few frames of the 30-frame running man animation against the blue background.

This animation has a little glitch: The first frame shows the running man slightly elevated, i.e. higher than in the rest of the frames.  Maybe we forgot to drop him to the ground level before using the walk designer. Maybe there's another reason for this. Whatever the reason, this can easily be fixed by doing a Shifting transformation and moving the man down a little to match the position in the other frames.



The Animation toolbar has an icon that looks like a light bulb. This is the toggle buton for the Light table mode, also known as onion skin mode.

Click it.

Or use the keyboard shortcut :  l  (i.e.lowercase 'L' as in 'light table')
When Light table mode is enabled, you see more than just the current frame. PD Pro will show you the current frame, plus a dim image of the next and prior image, and an even dimmer image of the next one after that and prior to that, respectively. Essentially, two frames before the current and two frames after can be seen at the same time.

This works well when the background is very light or white. In our example, the dark blue background darkens the character's colors.

Here the current frame (showing darkest, most solid) is frame #2. The foot from the first frame, pointing to the front and slightly up, is dimmer.
Use control-l  in order to toggle the mode of the light table. This helps when you need to see the original colors.





We will need to adjust the vertical position of the first frame.
Scrub the slider on the animation toolbar to select the first frame. This means that you'll only see 2 more dimmed images, as there are no 'prior' frames before the first.


Go to the:

menu: Filter > Transform > Shift...

to activate the shifting tool.
This tool is used to shift pixels in any direction.

Place the cursor on the hand icon, click and drag to start shifting. Move downwards to see the current frame's image moving down.
It will take a vertical shift by about 18 units down to make the foot reach about the same level as that of the subsequent frames.
Now the position of the first frame's foot is closer to the same level as the other frames.

You should save this corrected animation. It will save time if you need to quickly get back to it.

PD Pro has its own raw (uncompressed) animation format. The animation is saved as a .dwa  file (DogWaffle Animation)

menu:  Animation > Save...
Enter the name and click Save.

You'll notice probably that saving this file is very quick.
Likewise, re-loading a DWA animation is very fast. Try it on this animation that was just saved, or on another.

If you need an external (standalone) viewer for DWA animations, use the free utility:

 DWA viewer in the plugins area
   part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4