In yesterday’s post we showed how to build a masked photo mosaic effect from a movie brush that contains an embedded alpha channel. Today we will show how we built the masked movie brush used in yesterday’s post from a folder of alpha matted images.
It’s easy to use Studio Artist to convert a folder of images into a movie brush. You just build a single step paint action sequence (PASeq) that erases the canvas to the source image. You then run the Action : Process with paint Action Sequence : Image to Movie menu command. This menu command will then process a folder of images you select one by one, and output the images as frames in a generated movie file.
If the images you want to use to build a movie brush have alpha channels associated with them, you can incorporate the image alpha channels into an embed alpha channel in your movie brush. So each frame in the movie file will consist of a RGB image as well as an alpha channel that can be used to mask the RGB frame image. The coffee cup frame shown at the top of this post is an example of an alpha masked movie frame. Embedded alpha channel movie brushes are useful when you want to build photo mosaic imagery composed of irregular shaped objects (as opposed to rectangular mosaic blocks).
Not every movie compression codec supports embedded alpha channels, so you need to make sure your movie is generated with a compression coded that supports embedded alpha channels. For this example we’ll be using the Animation codec at Millions + colors option.
The screen capture below shows the folder containing 4 alpha matted photoshop images that will be used as the source for the embedded alpha channel movie brush I want to generate. Note that I sequentially numbered the individual image files.
In general, you would want to use many more images than 4 to create a movie brush. Especially if you want to use RGB Mapping for your frame modulation when painting. You want to put together a full set of images that can represent the coloring of the main source image you want to represent as a photo mosaic composed of smaller movie brush frame images.The paint action sequence (PASeq) I used to generate the embedded alpha channel movie brush from the above folder of images is shown below. Note that it is composed of a single action step that erases the canvas to the source image.
If for some reason you have been manipulating the alpha channel of the current layer, you should either reset it to full on or erase to white before rendering the output movie file. And turn off Canvas : Alpha : Enable for View if you had it turned on. Also, you want to be using a single canvas layer when you generate your movie file. And you want the view to be set to View Current.
