Imported image sequences displaying incorrectly

[William Conway]

I'm having trouble with importing pngs into opentoonz. I know how to rename, order them correctly and import them onto the xsheet. My problem is once they are on there, regardless of camera and level settings, each image appears cut off. There are also black lines on it, but I think maybe that is to show that the area is transparent? I thought at first the image had just gone beyond the boundaries of the level but I tried changing the level settings to match the size of the images and they are still cut off.

Link to a screenshot of this problem here.

[William Conway]

The problem seems to only apply if the images have transparency. Surely the software must support transparent pngs though?

[BlenderBeetle]

could you maybe put the screenshot in a comment here? i click the link and it asks me to sign into microsoft. 

[William Conway]

My apologies. Here is the image:

I've just been experimenting with it and I think it's because I exported it form photoshop as a png 8. png 24 seems to work thankfully :) Good to know. It's an odd issue.

[BlenderBeetle]

hmmm... mind uploading a video of you importing? (Open Broadcast Software is a free screen recorder if you don't have one on your computer) 

[William Conway]

PNG8 vs PNG24 transparency test Hope that's clear enough. As I said it seems to work fine with PNG24. Hope that is of use to somebody anyway!

[BlenderBeetle]

i've never heard of the difference (PNG8/PNG24) I just use PNG. is this a windows 10 thing? (I'm glad you found a solution, is it working for your fox?) 

[William Conway]

Thanks, yeah it's working now. The PNG8 and 24 are all the same file type, but it refers to the level of compression used when exporting them. PNG 8 just has lower quality and has a much lower file size. I'm not sure why opentoonz doesn't work with it. It's ok because I think I would only be using the higher quality PNG24s for proper projects. That was really annoying me as it's probably the most important function of the program for me :) 

[Herbert123]

Incorrect, PNG8 and PNG24 are quite different "beasts".

The PNG format supports various bit depths (number of colours per pixel).

• indexed colour mode: up to 256 colours (8bit), and the colours are saved in a colour table (hence the "indexed"). Indexed PNG files support either 1bit transparency (on or off) or full transparency (8bit with 256 levels of transparency).
• 8bit per channel - 256 levels per red, green, and blue channel. This allows for total of 2²⁴ or 16,777,216 color variations. In this mode 8bit transparency is supported. There is no support for 1bit transparency.
• 16bit per channel - 32,767 levels per red, green, and blue channel. Useful for high-range colour editing in photography and visual effects, 3d work, and so on. Again full transparency support.

Photoshop's save for web function is rather limited, and gets is all wrong in terms of naming: the SFW PNG export only supports 8bit png files with 1bit transparency, while just about any other application supports 8bit with full transparency. Secondly, when you save a "PNG24" with transparency, it should really be called a PNG32, since it includes an 8bit alpha channel (8bit transparency).

Anyway, I am simplifying some of the concepts here. If you are interested in learning more, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

Now, the reason why PNG8 is not imported correctly, is simple: Toonz expects the transparency to be 8biy. When you save a PNG8 in {hotoshop, it results in a 1bit transparency which Toonz attempts to interpret, but fails.

[William Conway]

Well thank you for the in depth explanation, I guess my knowledge of the file types is rather limited! I'm just glad it works and it's good to know why.

[Juls_3000]

Thank you, indexed here : https://workflowy.com/s/JtI13Zub8a#/281e60e1dc57