V9 Suggestion: Automating Beziers.

farss wrote on 12/12/2007, 2:35 AM
I'm really coming to grips with Beziers, both in Vegas and PS. They are extremely useful and an absolute PIA at the same time. We've got a number of tools that create bitmap masks, CK, Mask Gen etc. PS has a colour picker. But if you want to manipulate a bitmap mask what a PIA that is.
So why don't we have a way to create a Bezier from a bitmap mask?
Let the CPU do the hard work of building the Bezier and then we can refine it. The conversion routine would need some configurable parameters so we didn't end up with a zillion nodes but beyond that surely it couldn't be that hard, the code to convert bitmaps to vectors has been around for decades.

Bob.

Comments

Grazie wrote on 12/12/2007, 2:57 AM
Nice idea, Bob, but it wont happen. The code is too much to do. And add another add on to an NLE? Do you REALLY want a bloated NLE? Leave this to s/w that can do it. If you want something that WILL do it, it will cost a lot more.

We can suggest as much as we want. It is about business and that's the bottom line here. Ideas are 2-a-penny. Somebody has to make a profit from all that time put in.

Better we should have some of the basics turned our way. . .. HELL!! I've become somebody else?!?!?

Grazie
farss wrote on 12/12/2007, 3:50 AM
You might be correct actually. The task could be way more complex than I at first thought. I've not seen this trick in any other application apart from Autocad and even it couldn't get it right. Circles get converted to polygons for example. In other words to do the conversion takes more than just raw number crunching, it needs a fair amount of AI. Any of us can looks at something and say it's a circle that's defined by two parameters. To a machine it can't tell the difference between a large number of small lines and a circle as it doesn't know about context ,well not yet, maybe one day.
Was a good idea until you burst my bubble, dang.

Bob.
TeetimeNC wrote on 12/12/2007, 5:11 AM
Bob, don't give up too quickly. Your post intrigued me and I did a google on "automatic bezier mask". Below is a link to a free tool that looks interesting. I haven't tried it but might on my next project.

http://www.sharewareplaza.com/Arkan-download_15144.html

Jerry