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Here are a few ideas on how to use a flatbed scanner and ordinary painting software for producing animation on your computer - I use a Mac myself, but these tips are applicable to PC and other platforms, too:
If the edit suite can't handle alpha, ask if they prefer a "chromakey" background. It must be of a color that is non-existent in the actual animation image, like this:
Since the duck is blue, I couldn't use the usual blue chromakey color. Instead, I chose a bright green. Check with your video editor, since different edit suites have different requirements.
The instructions for building a slide scanning device have moved HERE.
Since your scans are from line drawings, the resolution of an 8-bit greyscale 300 dpi scanner is more than enough. An ordinary animation drawing at 300 dpi can be even larger than 2400 x3600 pixels, which is actually too much! If you need to scan hand-painted backgrounds, too, a color scanner is usually necessary. Look into used equipment if you're on a tight budget.
1) Does the scanner re-position correctly? I've seen scanners that cannot do this. Check by scanning the same drawing several times, and confirm that the images all are identical. Even a 1-pixel error in positioning will show in the final animation as a jiggle or jitter.
2) Is the scanner's exposure constant? If the darkness varies from scan to scan, you may have problems with line thickness. Check this in the same way.
3) Is the scanner software suitable for animation scanning? Look for batch scanning, scaling, adjustable dpi settings, exposure settings (brightness & contrast). These are all useful.
This ensures that all your drawings will be registered correctly in relation to one another. It is very hard, almost impossible, to re-position images later.
This is important. NEVER scan images at a lower resolution than what will be used in the final production. If you do, the result will be jaggy. I usually set the scanning resolution to about 1.5 times the final resolution. If you set the resolution much higher, you just waste memory and hard disk space.
This ensures a good, sharp line, and also lessens your work in the painting software, especially if you scan in batches (see below).
The scanner will then read, say, 10 or 15 drawings in one scanning session. The number depends on the amount of memory you have, and whether your paint software can import several images in one session. You have to be alert, though. Many scanners scan the images in a batch one after the other, with no pauses other than the scanner's head moving back to the starting position. This usually gives ample time to change the drawing on the pegs, unless you've fallen asleep, of course...
You may have to re-scan an image later. If you save the settings from each scene, re-scanning is a piece of cake!
See above! I always build a palette of all the colors I use in a scene. Just using the color picker is risky - there are six nearly identical greens on that default palette...
Often many time-saving commands are overlooked. Setting the tolerance for the paint bucket can make or break the looks of an image. Set the tolerance as high as possible - then the paint "flows under" the lines. Anti-aliasing the bucket also helps. Try to avoid getting lighter pixels between the outline and the painted area. With correct settings, this works automatically.
This speeds up the work enormously. I have to scale, rotate and remove bluepencil lines from every scan. With a macro, it is just one keystroke!
This enables you (or the video edit suite) to superimpose the animation drawings on a background (painted or live-action). An alpha channel is basically a black & white mask that is included as a special (usually invisible) layer in the image file:
(The image is from a "SOTKA" TV commercial I recently animated.)
This is also very important, especially if they are used by an edit suite. If you use a Mac, remember the 8+3 naming convention of the PC world. A suitable naming scheme could be "SA0001.TGA" (S for "Sotka", A for scene A, 0001 for drawing 1), then SA0002.TGA, etc. Make sure that no numbers are missing in the series! File names like this work on edit suites that transfer the images automatically to RAID disks for live video storage.
This is useful if you need to show the animation to a client before the actual video editing is done. Also, if you're working on a project of your own, you can import the movie into Premiere, Videoshop, or any other similar software, add a soundtrack and edit your production to your heart's content...