Wave action

[LumenLux]

Lin - when you so candidly wrote that you might be "bored" (re: your helicopter animation), I could not resist making this post which I had been considering.

Recently, with PTE V5 in mind, I took quite a few rapid-fire shots of ocean waves. I took them from several angles, with multiple exposures from each angle. Using rocks as support, rather than a tripod, some show minor camera movement. My idea of course was to try some V5 O&A features on the waves. But I found my first playing with the photos to be not very satisfying. So I am wondering if you or anyone else would like to take a crack at assembling a "successful" animation of some kind utilizing the waves. I have tried briefly with animation, zoom, pan etc. but have not hit a real pleasing effect. Maybe someone has already worked along these lines. I would love to see what anyone has done or might try to do. If anyone expresses any interest to try, I will zip some wave shots together for anyone interested.

[ksf]

I would be interested in giving it a go - it sounds like an interesting challenge. If you would like to send some images I will see what I can do with them though I can't promise you a completion date as it may take me a day or two to come up with something (bit like waiting for 5.9...)

[thedom]

I would like to give it a try, but as Keith said, I do not garantee a completion date and a successful animation.

Could you please send me your pictures at thefreedom @ free.fr.

Thanks.

[Barry Beckham]

There is a great invetion to get movement into water, its called video.

Sorry, but I could't resist

[Ronniebootwest]

There is a great invetion to get movement into water, its called video.

Sorry, but I could't resist

Touche! Barry.

Maybe we are all forgetting this. Panning, zooming and rotating are all we really need in a slide show, let's not get carried away and forget that audio visual is what it is all about. Remember the Kodak Carosel?

Ron

[ksf]

Audio Visual in my dictionary states "involving and directed at both sight and hearing". So, if someone wanted to they could incorporate video into a sequence. Why not? I'm not saying it would be any good, or particularly easy to watch, but it is possible and given the right subject matter could be very effective.

To some extent you (Barry and Ron) are missing the point about wanting to make water move. I don't even particularly want to myself, but these sorts of challenges are an ideal way to exercise the old grey matter and think about how to achieve something then go and do it. Surely it is far better to learn techniques and products this way rather than rely on others to produce templates then have them amend them for your purposes? In other threads recently there has been several occasions when people (The Dom, JPD, ...) have issued templates. These have been excellent and I hope they continue to show what can be achieved with PTE. However, rather than people studying them, analysing them, and experimenting for themselves they have continually asked for changes to the templates so they can just substitute their photographs - which to me is basically like having someone else make their sequence for them.

In another thread I asked if effects could be imported from ProShow (Ron's comment was "too many effects spoil a sequence"). Having had some success in international competition I think I understand what makes a good sequence, but I would still like to know if it could be done. Some would even say that the panning and zooming are not required but we have already seen some superb examples of how they can be used.

We all have to move with the times, otherwise why would we have ever progressed from the magic lantern?

[Ronniebootwest]

OK Keith, you have a point!

It was not my intention to be critical or anything like that. I simply wanted to point out that PTE, as a program, has been highly sucessful as a 'Slide Show' producing piece of software and we seem to be pre-occupied these days with animation. If it is over used, we are in danger of losing the plot, but that is only my opinion.

Sorry if I did not make my point as clearly as I ought to have done. I applaud the work of all those members who have taken the time to create templates that have now been made available to everyone, we need their input and I take my hat off to them all!

Ron

[Tomuk]

There is a great invetion to get movement into water, its called video.

Sorry, but I could't resist

Or Sqirlz water reflections a freebe program obtainable from the net, give your images a coat of this and see the result.

Tom.

[Ken Cox]

Lin made a demo of the water moving some time ago using a program like Tom described

I d/l the wmv october 1 2006 -was called reflect

the summary tag says PicturesToExe original 63 mb +-

the exe is 6.5 mb +- and i d/l it aug 20 06

Reflections Per theDom's earlier post\Mirage - WnSoft Forums.htm

and dom issued this

Mirage - WnSoft Forums.htm

An effect of reflection made with the software "Reflet " (http://www.photofiltre.com/).

Aug 20 2006,

so maybe you can go backwards and read the threads

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....p;mode=threaded

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....p;mode=threaded

http://www.ibdprince.com/java2.shtml

ken

[ksf]

Hi Ron,

I agree with some of your points that we need to be careful about the use (or misuse) of animation. Do you remember when Cokin filters were all the rage. Everyone went overboard with them (we saw tobacco skies, speed, and multiple image fiters and so on). After the novelty wore off things settled down and people returned to concentrating on taking good images rather than dressing them up with special effects. I think we are seeing the same thing happen with v5. People are experimenting. They are keen to learn the new features, to learn their limitations, what will or won't work well in a sequence, and so on. I think (hope) things will settle down once people have got it out of their system. We should use just the occasional piece of animation effects (panning & zooming will probably be the most common) for impact - so you are quite right if we overdo it the sequence will lose impact and appear gimmicky. One feature of v5 that I think will be used more is the ability to have transparent (png) images on different layers and to alter the opacity of them independantly. Exciting times lie ahead and I look forward to seeing some interesting creations (and trying to fathom out how they have been made).

[Lin Evans]

I'm assuming you don't mean the reflection "wave" or rain falling in water "ripple" effects but rather something like a boat floating in water with waves lapping at the hull?

If so, it may not be an easy thing to animate. The various "reflect" and wave action effects and ripples in water from drops, etc., are essentially done by multiple frames in a movie type action. This makes it difficult to put in other objects with their own animations simultaneously because to work correctly the other objects must appear in each frame of the sequences with slightly different positions to create the illusion of movement. With the reflection and water movement effects the same still image is repeated for each frame giving the illusion of only the water/ripple moving.

To get wave actions using PTE it would be necessary to use multiple images each with a slightly different frame and to do this would require one of two alternatives - neither very easy to achieve. First one could animate the various objects in each frame and sequence the frames in movie fashion as separate slides. The other way would be to have multi-frames as separate "objects" each on their own individual layer and turn them off an on using the opacity function. Doing it this way would allow normal animation of other objects and achieve the movement effect of the water via pattern repetition. If the effects could be created with only a few (perhaps 10) frames for the water, then it might be possible to do without overloading the graphics environment but it would almost necessitate a recreation of the difficult timing sequence each time the effect was needed - in other words not terribly amenable to templating.

If I get a chance, I may try to do this just for the curiosity of seeing if it could be done.

On the other points of animation demos versus slideshows enhanced with animation - PTE is primarily a tool to produce superior presentation slideshows - on that I think we can all agree. But to explore the power and use it to its full advantage it's helpful to some of us to probe the depths of its power. That's how we learn what can and can not be done and how we can best use these effects in a show to elicit the desired emotion or response from the audience.

The nice thing is that we "can" do more than pan, zoom, rotate and scroll if we so desire. There is no reason for anyone who only wants to use only the PZR effects (or not) to need to learn these alternative powers, but as many of you may have noticed, there have been numerous great slideshows created which "did" take advantage of more than just PZR (spotlights, opacity masks, falling leaves,etc.). So we should be thankful that we have a choice. The power to animate and the restraint to not animate when it doesn't fit. Just remember that most of us who are creating animation demos are doing so with the intent to learn more and to pass on that experience to those who may not have the time, energy or aptitude for experimentation. There is a method behind the "madness" folks....

Best regards,

Lin

Lin - when you so candidly wrote that you might be "bored" (re: your helicopter animation), I could not resist making this post which I had been considering.

Recently, with PTE V5 in mind, I took quite a few rapid-fire shots of ocean waves. I took them from several angles, with multiple exposures from each angle. Using rocks as support, rather than a tripod, some show minor camera movement. My idea of course was to try some V5 O&A features on the waves. But I found my first playing with the photos to be not very satisfying. So I am wondering if you or anyone else would like to take a crack at assembling a "successful" animation of some kind utilizing the waves. I have tried briefly with animation, zoom, pan etc. but have not hit a real pleasing effect. Maybe someone has already worked along these lines. I would love to see what anyone has done or might try to do. If anyone expresses any interest to try, I will zip some wave shots together for anyone interested.

[LumenLux]

Thank you each for the interest. In a couple of hours I will post some series of the waves (mulitple files)for downloading for your use. It will be very interesting to see what ideas can materialize.

[LumenLux]

Here are links to 7 zip files of the ocean wave shots. The photos are taken from 7 different camera locations. Some series of shots show some camera movement. A couple of series have tilted horizon. And some shots have salt water spray on the lens. Each series may have more shots than you will ever need, but I don't know what ideas you might come up with for V5 use of these photos. All photos are 1024 x685.

Waves#1 33 photos 14mb

Waves#2 28 photos 12mb

Waves#3 17 photos 7mb

Waves#4 26 photos 10mb

Waves#5 46 photos 17mb (horizon problem)

Waves #6 18 photos 7mb (good)

Waves #7 21 photos 9mb (sloped horizon, but steady shots)

I have now "played" with V5 on these enough to be even more interested in what you may come up with. From the discussion, I can imagine a wide range of possibilities - from other than myself.

[LumenLux]

I have made myself a short demo of one simple way to use PTE V5 to put some motion in photos of ocean waves. No rush on anybody else, but I do hope some of you will try the ideas you have had and will share them.

The short demo is here

[mightec]

I don't wish to be drawn into this discussion, I am not qualified to do so, my reason for this reply is to record my amazement at the 'short demo' posted by LumenLux. I don't know how you did it, but because I have watched some of the magic of TheDom and others I can possibly guess, what a fantastic effect. thanks for sharing this with us.

[ronwil]

An excellent first attempt. Very realistic and useful as a background to a title sequence. Well done.

Ron [uK]

[Lin Evans]

This is great! You know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. I had a great idea which was working beautifully. Butter smooth wave action and allowing PZR effects on top of the gently rolling sea. It looked beautiful right up until the time I crashed my system by running out of memory - LOL. I had too many objects at once in the objects list. Essentially I duplicated the slides until I had enough to fill a 60 second time frame with four slides per second. I set all objects except the first to zero opacity at zero time then opened the first at zero seconds with 100% opacity then at .25 second I set it to zero and the second object to 100% then set the opacity to zero at .5 second. The third was set to 100% opacity at .75 second and to zero at 1.00 second and so on. In testing the preview this produced a flawless smooth rolling sea, much better than a movie effect because of the slowly progressing and building opacity from multiple frames.

When I got to about slide 28 I simply locked up the system with out of memory. On the system I was working on I have one gigabyte RAM so this approach is going nowhere.

I tried multiple slides in the slide list with various sequential timings and fade ins matching the slide duration which gave a rather nice effect but doesn't allow for PZR since it's simulating a movie.

I'm impressed with what you have done and still scratching my head trying to figure out how you did it. Since you were able to zoom I would assume that other effects including movement of other objects would be possible such as a boat moving across the water while the waves were rolling in.

Anyway I love your effect which could be also used with just open water wave actions I suppose to enhance the effects of a ship moving through the open seas. I can see this perhaps with a few icebergs. If possible this would work well with Ron's HMS simulation, etc.

Best regards,

Lin

I have made myself a short demo of one simple way to use PTE V5 to put some motion in photos of ocean waves. No rush on anybody else, but I do hope some of you will try the ideas you have had and will share them.

The short demo is here

[Ednys]

Crumbs, What a wonderful effect those waves make, they look good enough to jump into and have a splash around....

You know we can take still photos on video cameras and we can take videos on our still cameras, so the two once separate worlds are much closer together these days, and although I understand previous comments and fears about what is happening to PTE I also find it both exciting and facinating to see what can now be done with a collection of still photographs. This in itself is showing how clever and dedicated some people are.

It may be just like the equipment we use, it is an evolving craft and we have to go with the flow.

Just a personal thought.

Glenys

[Lin Evans]

O.K., here's mine - LOL

I guess I could have gone a bit further and moved the clouds, etc., but that "may" have pushed the graphics memory over the edge for many - even this one might.....

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/waves.zip

Best regards,

Lin

[LumenLux]

Thanks Lin! I have just downloaded and will certainly look right now. Then I will try to go to bed and respond tomorrow. I know without looking, your production will be great. Of course it deserves a better response than that. I had read with compassionate, misery-sharing amusement, your late night crashing due to memory overload. So I thank you even more for not giving up.

[LumenLux]

Thanks again Lin. Now how about Keith and theDom? Are you (or anyone) working on this wave action thought? I know you both said you can't promise a time table. That is fine, I understand. I'm eager to talk about Lin's technique and my approach and I have some other questions. However, I would prefer to see what else is being done first.

[Lin Evans]

I discovered that it will not bog down the system to add cloud movement to my version but can easily be done via a simple mask and an additional PNG.

In my original, I didn't bother to straighten the horizons on the individual frames but rather just rotated them in each frame. I'm going back and straighten each individual frame to make the mask more accurate and will have the cloud movement added to the demo. I look forward to seeing other approaches to this interesting challenge.

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks again Lin. Now how about Keith and theDom? Are you (or anyone) working on this wave action thought? I know you both said you can't promise a time table. That is fine, I understand. I'm eager to talk about Lin's technique and my approach and I have some other questions. However, I would prefer to see what else is being done first.

[thedom]

Now how about Keith and theDom?

Actually, I misunderstood your request. I thought you wanted to achieve an animated composition of several photos with pan and zoom to simulate the idea of the waves in an "artistic" way, not make a kind of video effect with still photos.

I think the demo you made is really nice though.

[LumenLux]

Actually, I misunderstood your request. I thought you wanted to achieve an animated composition of several photos with pan and zoom to simulate the idea of the waves in an "artistic" way, not make a kind of video effect with still photos.

I think the demo you made is really nice though.

No, you did not misunderstand me. I am interested in ideas in either/any direction. I am interested in the creativity of some you who are also extremely good with the mechanics of V5. So if you do want to do anything with V5 features on any of the wave photos, please feel free to have fun and share it with us. Your input in this forum is valued by everyone.