Finally have the Correct FFMPEG, But, An issue

[Erik Mak]

Background is Black, Can't ger the Background Bar to display

What could be causing this?

[Erik Mak]

How do I have the Original Background showing instead of the Black Screen?

Ball is shown, But Background is Not

[Michael Chandy Thomson]

Sorry for late reply. Rendering to MP4 will result in a white background because it doesn't support transparency.

In OpenToonz, the canvas may be white but generally when exporting, the animation is exported with a transparent background for compositing.

Some video formats support transparency such as MOV and WEBM, and as a result in video players the background appears black.

If you want to add a background in OpenToonz itself, go to Menu Bar > Windows > Schematic.

You should get either of these windows:

If you got the Stage Schematic window press the button on the bottom right of the window to switch to the FX Schematic window (outlined in red).

This is a node compositor. Each node represents an element and we can read it as a flowchart.

So for example, the above image reads as:

Col1 (Animation Layer Name) --> goes into X-Sheet --> goes to Output.

X-Sheet is just an organization node as I understand it. You'll see why we use it in a bit.

Okay, let's get to what node compositing is. I imagine it as a conveyor belt in a factory which sends a frame at a time and at a node an effect is stamped on each frame. So let's say we wanted a vignette effect, we'd use a node to add a vignette look to each frame:

Now what we want is a background, so we'll use a background node.

In the FX Schematic window right click anywhere in the window to open up a context menu: Add FX > Background > Color Card.

Double click the node to open that node's settings window. Adjust the colour as you want it to.

You may notice that it connects to the X-Sheet automatically. In OpenToonz, any input going into the X-Sheet node can be layered in the X-Sheet itself. OpenToonz does have some Layer_blending nodes for advanced layering, but there's no need to get into that now.

Press Ctrl + R to preview the render to make sure you've got your background.