Sherman,

"Smart Smoother" is one of several de-noiser plug-ins, and that isn't what I am going after here, although de-noising video is a good idea. I am thinking about the effects such as in the movie "A Scanner Darkly" or "Waking Life". The vector video effect is discussed in "Give your photos that 'A Scanner Darkly' look".

On that link, one of the respondents commented that Bob Sabastian, who was the animation director for "Scanner" and "Waking Life", wrote the "Rotoshop" software, and is also the one who does all the Charles Schwab commercials. Apparently he has learned a few tricks, because the Charles Schwab commercials look much smoother in time correlation than the previous movies (Waking Life and Scanner).

Hopefully Bob Sabastian isn't the only person on the planet who can pull this off. It would make a great plug-in for Vegas, or a standalone video processor, for that matter.

-- seeker --

Apparently it isn't available outside of Flat Black Films and Sabiston, according to Wikipedia.

The EdgeDetective plugin from vasst.com can do some of these types of things; download the trial and see what you can come up with.

<edit> "it" = true Rotoshop

Don't know which software you could use for that, because I never tried this effect.

Just my opinion, I know , a lot of people like this effect but I think this effect is ridiculous, even more so than realistic CG people. That is the reson I cannot watch Scanner Darkly or Waking Life for more than 10 minutes.

If you are going for realism, just use real people, this way you either have, in case of 3D; real looking people with stiff expressions who look like they have all been botoxed to death, or in case of this vector effect, real people / video which looks like somebody screwed up something in processing and it all came out like looking like crap.

It looks like a mistake, not an effect.

And, by the way, since I've been using flash from the very first version, this kind of effect was done ( not as well, but close ) long before Waking Life. Flash itself had trace bitmap function, so you could have used that or something from Illustrator, Freehand ( not made any more I believe ), etc..... And some people were using it in flash animations ( and I didn't like it back then either :-) )

Apparently he has learned a few tricks, because the Charles Schwab commercials look much smoother in time correlation than the previous movies (Waking Life and Scanner).

Or perhaps he gave Richard Linklater the style he wanted, and gave Charles Schwab the style they wanted. Stands to reason that films with a sort of "dreamy" vibe to them might be a little more off-kilter than ads for an investment firm.

Rob

A Scanner Darkly was covered in a past issue of American Cinematographer, you could probably search their archives and get a copy of the issue.

This was in no way an 'effect', a tremendous amount of labour was used. The technique from memory is called Interpolated Rotoscoping. Not much was revealed but it seems to involve taking one frame, creating a single vector based drawing similar to the How To article referenced above and then using a very large number of trackers to interpolate subsequent frames with probably a heck of a lot of manual adjustment along the way. They seemed to have had a financial and morale crisis around the half way mark, maybe it was a labour of love and the love ran out.
I also seem to recall the work was done at around 15fps which might explain the juddery motion.

Can't find which issue of the magazine but this article here covers it pretty well.

Bob.

Rob,

Or perhaps he gave Richard Linklater the style he wanted, and gave Charles Schwab the style they wanted. Stands to reason that films with a sort of "dreamy" vibe to them might be a little more off-kilter than ads for an investment firm.

I agree completely. The Charles Schwab TV commercials are special, and their vector graphics scream quality (and big money). I have never seen such good time correlation. And I totally want it.

It has been suggested that a lot of hand work is still required to get that kind of quality, and I wouldn't contradict that. However, I think the time will come when that level of vector video quality can be achieved entirely by software and a lot of computer horsepower. I am hoping that will be fairly soon.

The video plug-in developers are already cashing in on the Charles Schwab video effect right now. Digital Anarchy's ToonIt! plugin for After Effects talks directly about getting the Charles Schwab effect in their tutorials. ToonIt can get a sort-of kind-of Charles Schwab look, particularly in conjunction with further scripted frame-by-frame post processing in Adobe Illustrator CS3. It's possibly the closest that currently available software can come to the Charles Schwab effect, but it definitely isn't as good as "the real thing" on the Charles Schwab TV commercials.

But ToonIt! is pretty good. It costs $295, and if it were available for Vegas I would probably buy it. It seems that After Effects has always had much better third party support than Vegas. I guess the third party guys go where the money is.

Next time you see one of those Charles Schwab vector video commercials, take a close look. The individual vector shapes themselves are individually smoothly animated from frame-to-frame. It's amazing time correlation.

-- seeker --

I believe with the Richard Linklater or Charles Schwab look, you have to start with art direction and makeup. The effect is gotten by finding the edge or line between different contours. I believe the actors are wearing non-realistic makeup to help accentuate this effect.
So this is not strictly a post-production look.



What do you mean by time correlation? Do think that is done by hand or by software?

Hey, I got the same effect using an old MAC 4 color video card. No handwork at all. It's automatic.
JJK

There are several filters for VirtualDub that can achieve a similar effect.

Andrew

I'd suggest if you want to have a go at doing this to checkout Bauhaus Mirage.
http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/2D_Animation.php

Expect to devote one heck of a lot of time to the process.
This is not even remotely an FX, if it was you'd see a lot more of it no doubt and a few people out of work.

Bob.

as the wikipedia article you pointed to states

Each minute of animation required 500 hours of work with 30 people working full-time every day.


ouch

I couldn't agree more with the last couple postings above. Several years back, I was very intrigued by the Scanner Darkly rotoscoping look, and I spent a lot of time looking at all the software/FX options. There is nothing that will give you that look without extensive animation/illustration experience and mass, mass amounts of elbow grease. It's just not practical for the average person. I talked with one of the developers involved with the Mirage software, and he was pretty honest about saying that Mirage can give you a foundation to begin the work and maybe save some of the time that you would have done by hand 5 years back, but still it's a huge endeavor.

The plugins you can purchase at the VASST website can give you some similarities to the rotoscoped look, and I've done some short projects that look pretty cool using those plugins, but if you hold them side-by-side to the Schwab commercials, it's not reasonable to compare them.