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The
Productivity Release:
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more: what's new?
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What's
new in 3.6 ?
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Summary:
- Dual monitor support (!)
- improved animation brush keyframer with motion tracking (!) , keyboard
shortcuts, speed enhancements, and other enhancements
- awesome new Art filters
- Powerful Browser enhancements - now you can really browse!
- MRUD list (Most Recently Used Documents)
- Memory Management during Animation Creation
- updated Lua scripts!
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Dual-Monitors
(aka dual-screens) |
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- There's now improved support for dual monitor systems.
Dual-screens are often used by professionals animators.
Graphics cards
have become so cheap and in many cases support two VGA or DVI outputs
(or a mix of VGA and DVI), allowing a second monitor to be used for
additional pixel real-estate. You could for example have a number
of user interface windows on one screen and the working artwork in
front of you on the other. Or, run other
apps on one screen while editing textures and background images in
Dogwaffle on the other.
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New Artistic
Filters |
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- Added "Graphics pen" plugin to the artistic filters menu.
- Added "Oilify" filter to artistic filters menu.
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the Browser:
all new and improved! |
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- The browser now saves its last used folder.
- You can now manually enter a wildcard pattern.
- There's now a detail mode with sorting of name/date/size
(and it still shows a small icon with it!
- There's now rename and delete functions. Use with care!
- There's now an option to open another browser instance.
- Drag and Drop is now implemented. You can drop files
to any folder in the explorer, or drop them to PD for opening.
- Speed and interactivity is improved.
- There's now a favorites list.
- you can resize the explorer part of the browser panel so as
to make more room for deeply nested folders and their subfolders.
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the list mode shows a small
thumbnail along with the
size and date
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The Improved Brush
Keyframer! |
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and now for something
completely different...
and now back to
motion tracking
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- Motion
tracking: You can now automatically track a point to make a
motion path. Then you can use that to render a brush (including
animated brushes i.e. a complete movie or a 3D rendering for instance)
along that path so as to match a position in the moving image's space.
During the motion tracking, PDPro uses a small block and a larger
search area. The small block contains the pixels it's looking for. The
larger search area should contain the pixels of the small block in the
next frame as the movie advances. If the motion is too fast and
the block has moved out of sight you may loose track and need to
increase the search area's dimensions. Tracking can of course also be
lost if there are significant changes in the pixel/color/contract
levels inside the small block. However, while this method may not work
for all scenarios (such as when the tracked block is moving out of
sight or isn't in sight at the start of the clip), there are a great
many cases where it wioll help in automating the tracking of a moving
item on which you'd like to place a brush containing a different image.
For example, the large bloom of a nova/light fx or lensflare to add
such visual fx over a crisp and simple bright light like the sun or
headlight of an approaching bullet train. Of course, you can also
manually keyframe the motion path - that's what the Brush Keyframer is
there fore in the first place.
- There are now keyboard shortcuts
for setting and deleting keyframes.
- The arrow
keys can be used to scrub (like in the main animation toolbar)
- You can now scrub through the animation with the right mouse button
so you don't have to move the mouse down to the scrollbar. This
dramatically speeds up an animation when you need to make many
keyframes: the combination of this with the keyboard shortcuts should
make it much faster and easier to set a number of keyframes.
- A decorative horizontal bar with a resize handle on its
right side has been added to the bottom of the Brush Keyframer
window, to make it clearer that the window can be resized, for example
to approximate the aspect ratio of the original animation or to make it
larger for fine positioning controls. Even if you're working on a small
video clip, you'll be able to preview and keyframe the path at large
size! (and of course also the other way around - if you work on HD
material, using a 1024x768 or other low-res configuration)
- You can now use blending modes: Opaque, Additive,
Multiplicative, Subtractive, XOR, Divide,...etc This is great for
visual fx like dark smoke
trails, bright fiery lights of burning meteors and explosions and
much more. Can also be important when you're rendering a pointing arrow
cursor that moves over a background animation of changing brightness
and color and you don't wnat to loose sight of it. (use XOR in that
case)
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motion tracking through
a video clip to add a custom brush along the path of an object
the first implementation of
the brush keyframer was with v2.1
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New LUA scripts |
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LUA
scripts
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We've
collected a whole bunch of them.
They're free to use also if you don't have version 3, since DogLua
scripting is available for all versions of Dogwaffle including the free
version 1.2.
Of particular interest is the new Multicolor
script, that performs similar fucntions to the new color correction
feature in 3.6, but has a color swatch based interface, different
options, and the ability to apply to an entire animation.
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Also: Miscellaneous
improvements |
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MRUD's:
a dynamic list of Recent Documents
a tool for developers:
the TestLayers plugin
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- Fixed a typo on the categorized list of keyboard shortcuts.
(Keyboard_Catagorized.rtf)
- Animation: Added keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste
frames.
- Animation>Create:
when creating an animation, PD Pro will show you much memory it will
need and how much free Ram your system has available. If you want to
avoid 'going virtual' by swapping through virtual memory (swap file) on
your disk (which is much slower than if it fits all in RAM), then you
might want to use memory tweaking tools such as RAMIdle from TweakNow.com or other RAM
management tools like rambooster (for Windows 98) or similar tools that
can free up memory, or simply buy more RAM if you can. [example]
- Added plugin
support for layers (!). If you use layers, you can make use of
filters - they work on the current layer.
- Added a TestLayers plugin for developers to
see how the
system works.
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the automatic blue removal tool
advanced options in the
'Adjust Color' filter
for
basic color correction.
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Download
and Installation
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Users of PD Pro 3.x (3.0 through 3.5): If you have a legitimately
obtained copy (purchased from an authorized reseller or us directly) or
an NFR copy you received as a reviewer or for other consideration from
us, you are invited to download and install this free updater.
> to the download : to the
patches page!
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