Best software/screen resolution for an independent animation?
by admin ~ June 9th, 2009 . Filed under: Drawing & Illustration .
g asked:
I’ve been storyboarding an idea for a short animation (3-5 minutes) and I’m wondering where to go next. I was planning to animate on tracing paper, scan it, superimpose the individual frames on a Photoshop-generated background and flatten the image, but I’m not sure which video editing software would support some 5000 clips at a frame rate of 12 fps. I also don’t know how big I should make the .jpeg files, or even what pixel size would be necessary. I’m a teenager and I don’t want to break the bank on software (there’s a budget of about $1000), but some general advice would be helpful. Thanks in advance.
Candelaria Mckean
I’ve been storyboarding an idea for a short animation (3-5 minutes) and I’m wondering where to go next. I was planning to animate on tracing paper, scan it, superimpose the individual frames on a Photoshop-generated background and flatten the image, but I’m not sure which video editing software would support some 5000 clips at a frame rate of 12 fps. I also don’t know how big I should make the .jpeg files, or even what pixel size would be necessary. I’m a teenager and I don’t want to break the bank on software (there’s a budget of about $1000), but some general advice would be helpful. Thanks in advance.
Candelaria Mckean
June 13th, 2009 at 12:19 am
I wouldn’t use tracing paper to draw your images onto, tracing paper is too translucent and may cause problems during scanning and compositing. Regular copy/printer paper should be fine, many independent animators use it for frame by frame animation. You’ll probably need a light box though. 10″ X 12″ light boxes can be bought at arts stores for $25-40.
As for software, you should use a program specifically designed for animation purposes to actually compile your movie, then edit your clips aftwards in a video editing program. An animation program will make it easier to arrange, re-arrange, add and delete single frames. Typically, playing around with multiple single frames is kind of difficult and bothersome in video editors since they weren’t designed with frame by frame animation as a primary function in mind. Also, you should be working at a frame rate of 24fps (work on 2’s: each image is onscreen for 2 frames), unless your animation is only going to be shown on the web. You can get away with smaller frame rates on computer screens without it affecting the quality of your animation, so animating at 15 or 16fps would be ok.
Your resolution will depend on where the film will be seen. If your film is only going to be shown on the web, you can work at a smaller resolution so it’s easier to download or stream online. If your film is intended for television broadcast, standard television definition is 720 X 540. If you plan to put it onto dvd, you’ll have to keep in mind that many people have Plasma or LCD HDTV’s, which most work a resolution of 1280 X 720p. If you intend to transfer your animation to actual film stock to be projected in a theater, then you need to work at even higher resolutions. Film doesn’t work with pixels, it captures images through a chemical reaction. However, the pixel resolution potential of film is equal to roughly 12 million pixels. It’s why such a tiny image on a film strip can have light shown through it and be blown up and onto huge theatre screens.
Even though it feels awesome to think about working with large hi-def resolutions, you have to keep in mind that the bigger the resolution, the heavier your image files and animation are going to be, the more hard drive storage space you’ll need and more RAM memory usage and strain will be placed on your computer. Making sure that your computer will be able to handle the workload is important.
Some of the better commercial 2D animation programs such as Digicel Flipbook, Toon Boom, TVPaint, TAB, and PAP, have Student or Express versions that are fairly inexpensive. However, you might be disappointed by how crippled these stripped down programs are compared to their more expensive Pro versions. But if you look hard enough you should be able to find them cracked online (rapidshare, bittorrent). There are some free alternatives.
If you’re doing old school drawn on paper frame by frame stuff or stop-motion or 2D, I’d suggest MonkeyJam. It’s free.
If you’re on a Mac, use Pencil(there’s PC and Linux versions as well).
If you want to do Flash animation like the stuff on Newgrounds.com, either break down and buy Adobe Flash or you can try Creatoon or Synfig, which are free. They’re not Flash, but they also do vector based symbol oriented animation with tweening.
These could both be used for frame by frame animation as well.
Here are some online resources about the basic principles of animation.
If you need any other help or info, let me know.