Stone Design Forums

When I add a paint layer to part of a video, it works fine. I'm able to draw on the video. I'm even able to layer paint layers one on top of the other.

However, if I save, close, and reopen the project, the paint layer becomes opaque and I can no longer see the video underneath. I just see black. The same thing happens if I add a Photoshop file to the movie by dragging it from the finder. Works okay to begin. Saving and reopening causes the portion with the photoshop overlay to become black.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Select a portion of a movie.
2. Add a paint layer.
3. Paint on it.
4. Save the project.
5. Reopen.
6. Go to section covered by paint layer, and it will be all black.

Of course, Paint saving/opening worked fine in 10.4.6 - can you verify that you are running 10.4.7? If I open the file itself, I see the paint layer correctly archived which is good news - so it's no doubt a display issue. I'll chat with my pals at Apple about this.

As to the photoshop bug - send me a small PhotoShop image to test.

I am indeeed running 10.4.7.

I think I saw this happen with Photoshop when QT went to 7.1.1 (currently on 7.1.2). I just simply quit using photoshop files and switched to png. The paint layer is a real drag though.

The photoshop file I am attaching works when you first add it, then goes dark the second time you open the project. This is exactly the issue I encounter with the paint layer.

Like you, I see the unarchive the paint layer bug - the good news is that I've determined that the original paint layer IS CORRECTLY in the document - so nothing has been lost. I'm trying to find a 10.4.6 machine so I can definitively tell apple something changed and that can help us determine a workaround.

As for the PSD - for me, I see the "black all over except where the stripe is" on the first drop into Videator - so I think it's an issue with CoreImage and the way adobe writes its alpha channel (different from everyone else, of course!). A very simple workaround - drop the PSD into Create or iMaginator and pull out a truly crossplatform TIFF, and use that in Videator. I can ask the CoreImage team about that too...

I took to using create with png to solve the photoshop bug. PNG files seem to generally work well. Thanks for your prompt attention. I look forward to eventually getting the paint feature back.

IS now eventually enough??

ftp://ftp.swcp.com/pub/tmp/a/Videator.dmg.gz

Should work fine now!
Let me know if it works for you so I can do an actual release tomorrow.

That was remarkable. When you speculated about the role of the system update, I foresaw months of waiting for a fix. It worked for me, which was great. That was an extremely nice feature which we wanted to make extensive use of in future exercise analyses (http://muscleventures.com/video).

BTW, does videator function okay on a g4 powerbook?

BTW, in case I wasn't clear. The fixed version works fine for archived paint layers.

The archived paint layer is restored shifted down and to the left on the video. I believe the shift to be equal to the size of the margin surrounding the video in the playback area.

So you think there is still a bug in unarchived paint? I'll do some more testing today.

I developed Videator on the G4 Powerbook - and it always ran dang fast (but that was before I tried it on the macbook pro)

Yes, I think the coordinates of the paint layer are off. There is a margin around the area where the video displays. The coordnates seem to be off by negative that margin.

How is there a margin around the video? The frame is always scaled to the size of the video. Do you have size to fit on, actual, double or half? I haven't been able to reproduce your bug - but I'm interested in knowing how you got the view a different size than the video it contains...

I'm using 640 by 480 video at actual size. This causes the video to have a margin around it. I have noted that this margin may be either black (when I first load the video) or the color of the window background (on subsequent openings). Sometimes, during export, the video will all migrate down to the lower left corner.

Setting the 640 video to "scale-to-fit" does not resolve the problem for the paint layer. All else remains in place.

send me a few seconds of that video so I can see what's up...

Videator is designed to have the view EXACTLY the size of the base video - (or double, or half or scaled to fit the current window size if those options are chosen). IE - there's something wrong in ....

A 5 second 7.7 MB quicktime movie awaits you here:

http://muscleventures.com/squat_demo.mov

when I import this movie and show it actual size, the videator screen does not resize to fit it.

Bud