I went to Borders and to Barnes & Noble.. Both claimed they carried Digit, but neither had it anywhere on the shelves. Is there anywhere to find the nearest 'Newtek dealer'?

Any old Amiga fans like me out there that are as excited to see AnimBrushes like I am???? DPAINT LIVES!!!

what does a video paint program actually do?

I'd say it just has a more paint-oriented interface. They start with the type of interface that you'd expect for painting on a static image and then tack on features that allow you to work across time as well. This approach contrasts an interface approach of something like, say, After Effects where the approach is a lot more procedural, involving orchestrating 'objects' with keyframes and such.

There are a lot of features that exemplify this, but from my experience with DPaint on the Amiga (I've only read about Aura so far) a few come to mind. With the animbrush feature that I mentioned, you could have an animbrush of a man putting one step in front of an another. This would be a series of bitmaps similar to an animated GIF. You can then take that and 'paint' with it by moving your mouse around. As you move the mouse, it advances frames in the empty movie you are working on and samples where your mouse is at that moment and stamps that frame of the animbrush at that spot where your mouse is on that spot on the given frame of the empty movie. So you can move your mouse from left to right on the lower third, across 30 frames or so and then have a movie of the man running from left to right.

Another feature I can think of that is exemplary of a 'video paint program' is something like a lighttable.. similar to what traditional animators use to paint on transparent cells while making comparisons to existing ones by laying them on top of each other. Dpaint had this and I hope Aura does.

ooh i thought of a good example.. Take a look at the animated gif I have at http://www.fantasyland.com/mpott/index2.html

I made that in DPaint simply by setting up an empty workspace of 320x200/4frames.. I simply rubbed my mouse pointer back and forth in the directions of the letters i wanted and it created the 'scratched into celluloid' effect. It would have been really annoying to create each frame separately unto themselves and then assemble them in a GIF editor or something.

P.S. What is the difference between Aura VideoPaint and Aura DV Paint?

I don't know but it's nice to know who Fongaboo is :>)

You can find your local NEWTEK dealer by going to www.newtek.com.

Aura as a video paint program is used for light compositing, rotoscoping and animations. The aniBrushes are a good feature and on top of that you can paint with a video as a brush as well.

K