Digital Painting Software - tutorials with PD Pro Digital Painter 4.1: post work special effects movie specialFX holywood style effects, rising air, turbulent water, animated displacement mapping

PD Pro tutorials:

Post Work with PD Pro 4.1: Cropping to remove dirty edges

more tutorials:

PD Particles

part 8

We now should trim the video clip along the edges, in order to remove the dark borders and garbage produced along the edges by the displacement and zooming.

Go to the Tools panel, look for the selection tools below the first row of tools: Lasso, Rectangle, Oval and Magic Wand

< Click the Rectangle selection tool (2nd row of tools)

click-and-drag a selection near the edges, but away enough from the border so as to avoid the dark noise.

< click to enlarge

After making such a selection, you can verify if it is small enough so the unwanted garbage along the edges is excluded. You can scrub through the timeline, or use the Lef/Right cursor (arrow) keys to quickly verify each frame.

Once you're satisfied with the selection, use the menu:

Image > Crop to selection

This will crop each frame of the animation to the selection.

Before you save the cropped animation to an AVI file, verify that it is of proper dimensions. It may be too small, and even worse, it may have an odd number of pixels in width or height.

Some compression codecs require a multiple of 4 or 8 pixels in width or height, so be sure to resample to something more standard after cropping.

Here for example, we see the width at 219 pixels and height at 175 pixels. Definitely not acceptable by many codecs. We should resample up to 220 or down to 216, most likely for width.

Select the menu:

Image > Resample...

to change the size to a more usable dimension in width and height. This will resize and resample all frames of an animation.

Notice that after resampling (or also after loading an image sequence from file) you may have an active alpha selection showing the full image selected,, as evidenced by the marching ants around the frame. Use Control-D or select menu:

Alpha > Clear alpha

if you find this distracting.

Here's an example of the finished animation, after cropping and resampling to the new size of 400x316 pixels, up from 219x175:

Serious tools for
aspiring Game Developers:

3impact

a complete physics-enabled game engine!

- fabulous physics -
- awesome visual fx -
- powerful & easy to learn -
- easy & royalty-free -
only $99
Make games that make
an impact - with 3impact!
Use it with your own 3D scene
creation and modeling tools!

still one of the best, now also
very affordable!

Poser + Carrara
+ Project Dogwaffle

New Lower Pricing!
Poser5

Powerful 3D for stunning human figures, creatures and other 2-legged monsters :-)

Poser 5 for $79 or less - free shipping included in the US

boxed version!

as low as
$49.95
Get it while it's available!

Don't know how to use Poser?
Get the VTC Tutorials!