Choosing an animation workflow

Corel Painter offers different animation workflows:

Customizing an animation-specific color set

You can customize a color set for the animation to better control the use of color. For example, using a particular color set prevents the colors of your characters from shifting between frames. You might want to set up an image of each character with annotations to specify which colors to use in which areas.

Not all colors are suitable for video.

You can’t display different sections of a movie at different rates. What you can do is create sections separately at different rates and then modulate them to the same rate before joining them. This is the kind of work you’ll do in your video-editing application.

For more information, see To set the preview rate.

Frame Stacks panel

In Corel Painter, digital video and animation files are known as movies or frame stacks. Whether you’re working with an imported digital video or building an animation from scratch, you can select and navigate frames from the Frame Stacks panel.

The Frame Stacks panel appears whenever you open or create a movie file and it must stay open while you work with a movie.

The number of frames displayed in the Frame Stacks panel is determined by the number of onion skin layers. A red triangle appears above the current frame.

You work in one frame at a time — the one appearing in the document window. The Frame Stacks panel helps you navigate the frames in the stack and choose which frame to modify.

Each frame in a frame stack can have one layer. For example, if you add an item from the image portfolio onto a frame, Corel Painter places the image on a layer. You can move the image around the layer. However, when you move between frames or close the file, Corel Painter drops all layers — the layer is deleted, and the layer’s content is flattened onto the background canvas. For more information about working with layers, see Layers.

The Frame Stacks panel displays thumbnails of several frames. The frame numbers appear under the thumbnails. The current frame is shown with a red triangle over it.

The number of thumbnails is determined by the layers of onion skin you’ve chosen. By default, QuickTime and AVI files are opened with two layers of onion skin. For more information about onion skinning, see Using onion skinning.

Setting movie file sizes

Keep in mind that video and animation can produce huge files. When planning a project, be careful not to overestimate your available disk space. For an idea of disk requirements, consider this example: Each 640 by 480-pixel, 24-bit color frame is 1.2 MB. At this size, a 12-fps, 30-second animation would consume more than 400 MB of disk space.

To calculate the disk space required for a frame stack

Bytes per pixel are determined by the storage type. For example, 24-bit color with an 8-bit alpha channel uses 4 bytes per pixel. For more information about storage types, see Creating frame-by-frame animation.

When you save a movie as QuickTime or AVI, the file size can be reduced by compression. For more information about compression, see Exporting movies as QuickTime and Exporting movies as AVI.

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