Sunday, June 21, 2009

I made a capture station today

So, I'm roaming the internet trying to find good ideas as to how to rig up a cheap capture station when I stumble upon Sunny's Blog, and his post on how he converted a lightbox into a capture station. Awesome, right?!

So, here's pictures of mine. It's not exactly like Sunny's, but I kept to the same basic idea.

I made it out of a beat up old piece of foamcore that I found lying around, some duct tape. It looks really crooked in this picture....but that's really fixable...




Cut holes in the side and taped pieces of vellum to help distribute the light.

The only part of this I had to buy was this webcam, which worked out nicely because I used parts of its package to mount it snugly to the top.


Here it is with the lights on. I tested the video feed and it works remarkably well!

Problem is I don't seem to have a program to actually capture animation with. TVP animation only seems to want to acquire images from a scanner, and Premiere CS3 doesn't seem to capture anymore. Of course, I don't know my way around those programs very well, so it's possible that I just missed it.

5 comments:

sunny kharbanda said...

Hey Marty!

That's a nice setup. I'm sure you can fix the leveling easily, or even work around it.

As for the capture: On a PC, you can use a nice free software called MonkeyJam. I have a more complete list of capture programs here:
http://sunnykharbanda.blogspot.com/2008/07/monkeyjam.html

Hope that helps!
Sunny

Marty Walker said...

Awesome! Thanks!

myrrh said...

nice!

David said...

"Problem is I don't seem to have a program to actually capture animation with. TVP animation only seems to want to acquire images from a scanner"

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TVP should capture video from any firewire webcam or digital video camera. Does your webcam connect with USB or Firewire (IEEE 1394) connection ?

The problem is most USB cams won't provide a live video feed that can 'talk' to TVP. Otherwise video capture should be no problem. I regularly shoot pencil tests in TVP using an Apple iSight webcam (which has a firewire connection) .

If you're still having problems email the TVP support -- support@tvpaint.fr

Actually, even though it is slower, scanning will give you better image quality. My rule tends to be video capture for really quick , rough tests, just to see what I've got , if the timing is working . Then for more finished tied-down rough passes I'll scan into TVP . (and of course final clean-up drawings should be scanned at high-res. , 300 dpi . )

David said...

"Of course, I don't know my way around those programs very well, so it's possible that I just missed it."

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Oh, yeah, the other thing I wanted to mention is that for video capture with TVP you need to remember to do three things:

1.) First , open the Video Grabber window from the Windows Menu. Select the camera from the Device menu and adjust the camera focus, white balance, exposure using the "Settings" button.

2.) In the main project window in TVP , go down to the lower right corner of the project window and enable the little "V" button . ("V" = video).

3.) in the Timeline at the left side is the Layers column ... at the bottom left it will say "Color" as the default (meaning it shows an opaque background color, usually white , unless you change it , in the Project window) Change that from "Color" to "None" .

Now you can capture video.

That seems like several steps, but after you've done it a couple of times it becomes automatic and it only takes a few seconds to adjust those settings to do video capture with TVP.
.

3.)