Maybe you can adapt this tutorial.

John

Thanks for the quick reply. I am so excited to learn more and create this idea I have in my head. Very happy I wont have the spend anymore money also.

Thanks again.

Take a look at Vol 2 #9 of my newsletters

Your newsletters are awesome Ed. Thank you for doing them.

Regards,
John

On the Adobe site I think there is a short video from Total Training that describes a technique for producing a "sketched" look using After Effects, Illustrator CS2 and Adobe Bridge.

IN a nutshell the workflow is something like this

Export some frames that you want to sketch (or turn into a cartoon style) as still image sequence (Vegas can do this) and then Use the new feature of Illustrator CS2 called Live Trace to trace the image in Illustrator. Play with it as you need to and then save the trace style as a Preset. Then using Adobe Bridge (comes with Illustator CS2) run a batch and trace all the still image sequences using your preset. Somewhere here you will need to save them back as still images with the appropriate file names and extension. But you then bring back into Vegas as a still image sequence.

I saw them do this with AE and Illustrator and said...I bet you could do that with Vegas too. I have not tried it yet.

-TomE

I ended up (after reading and working with everyones suggestions) downloading a plug-in from Pixelan and it works great. So far the opening of my "Racing" movie is awesome looking. IMO

Here is the link: http://www.pixelan.com/ce/features-pw.htm

I used the PosterWise effect.

>>...downloading a plug-in from Pixelan ..

I never knew that even existed. You would think they would inform thier customers via e-mail.

Now there's another thing I have to buy... :)

Thanks!

I agree about spending more money (it never ends) but at least these are reasonably priced. It seems that a lot of simple plug-ins can be very expensive from other companies.

Darrin

Good stuff, although if you're only doing the effect once in awhile, most of it can be done in Vegas, or with Vegas and a combination of the frame-by-frame manipulation in PhotoShop, like several people mentioned earlier. However, if you are going to do this more than once, then these plugins certainly are the way to go, since they're easier to set up and use.

I created a pretty nice cartoon effect in my video Ethics Superhero last year.

Ethics Videos

I could have easily done a much smoother animation had I been working from video still, but I was working with photo stills at the time. I used Corel's Photo paint smart blur with an edge detect layer over it. I also did some work on the jaw to make myself more "super" hero looking which would be much more labor intensive and not lend itself well to batch processing. But the basic cartoon effect was a script that I batched over the frames.

I liked that one Jim especially the part where he can't cut the steak with the steak knife so he turns it into a light sabre. Funny.

It also streamed very very well unlike Right is Never Wrong which I had to download to play smoothly. What settings did you use for Ethics Superhero?

John

The super hero file was rendered at 320x240 the RNW was rendered at 720x480. If you save to disk it should run better. Here's one that will make your connection choke (though it streams fine for me)


1280 x 720

Check out the new Pixelan product named CreativEase here:

http://www.pixelan.com/ce/upgrade.htm

Got some great effects and it's cheap!