From Storyboards to Animatics
By Brian J. Immel
Scanning Strategies for Preparing Storyboards for Animated Animatics
Resolution Considerations for Moving Images
PC or Mac? Television resolution for PCs is 72 dpi at 720 x 480 and Macs is 72 dpi at 640 x 480. Depending on which platform you use, these will be your choices for the basic composition size of the animatic.
Still shots vs. moving shots
- Basic rule of thumb: Scan larger than you need. Television resolution is 72 dpi but you will never know when the director will ask you to change a still shot to a slow pull-out or shaky camera look. Having a little foresight will save a few headaches down the road. But on the other hand, animatics don’t have to be the prettiest things on the screen. Sometimes, it is acceptable (but not as sellable) to scale an image beyond its normal resolution. As my rule of thumb, I scan my images in at 150 dpi.
- Stills – 72 dpi, 720 x 480 minimum size but I always scan at the size of the image and clean up the resolution later.
- Rotations: If the camera shakes or rotate, your need to figure how much it will rotate in the shot. Scan larger
- Pans – don’t have any special need for scanning resolution. The only consideration you must think about is how long of a pan is it? Does the camera pan a full 360 degrees? Can you fit your panning sketch into the scanner?
- Zooms – scan in around 300 dpi as rule of thumb. But if you want to be exact about it, figure out how close you are going to get in on the frame. Zooming in from a mid-shot to an extreme close-up of the face? If you are going to move in on the frame twice, scan at twice the base resolution (72 dpi x 2 zoom = 144 dpi).
Saving the raw scanned image
- Save the raw scanned image as either .TGA or .TIF format. Both of these formats are lossless which means they don’t compress the data when saved. Other formats that are lossy (jpeg, gif, bmp and so on) lose detail over time.
- When we are ready to edit the images in Photoshop, we’ll save the edits in a PSD format. Never work on the original image because you never know when you might have to go back to the original image.
Scan all your images at once. Don’t go back and forth between the scanning software and Photoshop to clean up each image as you scan them. Its faster to scan everything all at once, save them with temporary names in Photoshop, finish scanning and then start cleaning them up for use in After Effects.
| << Back to Maya Workshop page | |
| << Back to Maya Workshop page |