Resolution for animation: Your Thoughts

[Phil Ray]

Hey all,

Just wanted to ask you all: What are your thoughts on resolution for 2d animation in general?

I'm currently using raster levels (vectors run too slow on my machine) and I'm struggling to know just how high I should go. Even 1080p seems too pixelated to me... is it just my eyes?

Any help or advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Phil

[Willson Baer]

It really depends; bluray discs mostly have a 1020p resolution, dvd is about 576p or 486p (depending on whether it's PAL or NTSC). Unless you have a 4k tv or monitor it wouldn't make sense to go higher than HD, but if it's easier for you to work in higher resolutions you can always scale it down later (just make sure it has the same aspect ratio, for HD that would be 16/9).

[JJ Parks]

2D animation will always be my favorite. I grew up with it and highly respect the old painted cel features. I think that digital coloring looks much cleaner overall and am fascinated in particular with Japanese anime productions. I think if you are going to do a professional animation that vector is the way to go as you can scale it with time, but raster has it's place. My current setup is like this:

1) Draw in a raster-based iPad animation software (may do directly in OpenToonz soon but I don't have a Wacom tablet)
2) Import my drawings into a level in OpenToonz
3) Cleanup and trace pencil lines with inked vector lines
4) Hand-Paint backgrounds or make in Photoshop and import

For me this is a perfect system as it gets the raster-type background look of the traditional films and the clean digital lines of newer ones. Best of luck to you! I think this is an awesome program!

As for resolution, when working with Raster you may want to work larger than your intended output. This may be tricky if your system can't work with 1080p resolutions, but ideally if OpenToonz will support it, then you may want to work at something like 4K and then resample/resize it upon rendering. That would likely result in less pixelated final products. That's what I typically did when doing comic work back in the day with raster images :). Work big, resize later. A lot of the imperfections are lost this way as well.

[queeno...@gmail.com]

I use the NTSC digital resolution for my projects. I plan on uploading them to youtube and saving them on a flash drive should I lose my account.

[Rodney]

This is at the same time a fairly simple subject and yet complex due to the number of variables that can be brought into the equation.

Disclaimer:  I'm not technically proficient enough to point you in the right way but that hasn't stopped me before so I'll give you my 2 cents)

At the basic level we should understand that with regard to resolution raster imagery will always be of lesser quality than vector.

Bitmaps vs vector lines and shapes... it might help to consider this in terms of loss of data.

With bitmaps/raster imagery we are dealing with a finite canvas.

This is opposed to vector imagery that stores calculations that recreate those lines and shapes at any scale.

Some techniques are used to maximize raster imagery but we can't really get more out of raster than what we initially put in.

So we have to have that starting point, which for all intents and purposes seems to be the underlying question you are asking here.

With raster imagery there are two basic approaches to maintaining what is already there; this gets into the realm of codecs... encoding and decoding... lossy and lossless.  Do we want to maintain what we currently have or can we lose some of the data without adversley effecting what is seen there.

Skipping ahead a bit... perhaps the most important thing to do would be to frame your question in light of the target device.

This may have more to do with your hardware, your monitor for instance, than anything else.

An herein lies a question for you.  It seems to me that your concern is based on workflow at present and not the final product.

Is it just your eyes?  Well, maybe.

If you are working with raster imagery you will always have pixelization as that is the nature of bitmapping.

So, what to do? 

Well, one thing you could do is stop zooming in so closely on those pixels!  ;)

Zoom out instead.

Then notice that you see less pixelization.

It's magic I tell ya!

Perhaps more importantly than all this is the final product that you want to deliver/present.

But that doesn't seem to be the primary issue at hand here although after your workflow is hammered out it surely will be.

Aside:  One thing we can do in OT that can't easily be done is many other programs is to convert from raster to vector *after* we've accomplished what we intend to do at our working resolution.

While I don't always do this I often like to draw black and white linework in raster and then convert that linework to vector to achieve and lock in 'infinite' resolution.**

There is nothing... outside of our preferred workflow... that prevents us from moving back and between raster and vector formats as often as we like other than that each time we move to raster we risk losing image fidelity/accuracy in the process as the math takes over.

But, the bottom line is that if we want to avoid pixelation we need to move away from raster to vector.  Then the question of resolution becomes largely moot.

**@JJParks mentioned this and it follows pretty standard industry workflow.  Whether the initial imagery is scanned in first or drawn in raster the final linework/inking is more often than not done in vector in order to achieve the smoothness of vector's infinitely resolution.  OT gives us an advantage in how easy it is to move from raster to vector (and back and forth again repeatedly if we so choose).

Added:  One thing we should probably look at is why your are experiencing issues with vector drawing.  When you state that 'vectors run too slowly on my maching' that may be well worth looking into.

My number one rule of thumb when operating with vectors would be to save often to free up resources but other than that we'd probably need to know more about your computer's setup.