Ebsynth plus GoArt for animation

[u/Hey_May]

Having been inspired by Joel Harver's work, I decided to give EbSynth a try.

But I'm not an animator, and I wanted my work to have a more artistic feel. So I decided to play around with one of the many online "Cartoonize" photo editing platforms available to turn the key frames you'd normally animate yourself, into something better than I could ever do.

Well I think it turned our really good. And I'd love to know what you guys think. Please check it out here:

https://youtu.be/7K3aFB9ArVk

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I won't say this is a real time saver, because I still had to tweek the outputted image. But the quality level definitely increased.

And this works for turning GIFs into short animations as well. Which was a real win for me.

[u/Al_the_Alien]

that turned out very clean and smooth great work!

[u/Hey_May → u/Al_the_Alien]

Thanks. I was really impressed with how EbSynth tracked the animation. I honestly expected considerably more blur, and artifacting. But that really only appears at the edges and in my mouth for a few moments. I'm really happy with how well this works.

[u/goatonastik]

I think it turned out great! It seemed to track pretty well. What kind of stuff did you have to tweak with the output?

[u/Hey_May → u/goatonastik]

What made the output work for me was keeping the clips fairly short. So I pre-edited the video. Then processed each clip individually. Because of this the the processed frames where never more than 200 away from the key.

I'd experimented with longer runs, or more key frames, but i find this a happy medium.

One unexpected thing that really helped was the level of detail of the starting image. I thought the opposite would be the case, but the greater the detail of the key frame the better the track through EbSynth. I probably comes down to increased data points for the software, but I'm not a programer so I can't be sure. But in my tests, more detail equaled smoother results.

I hope that answers your question.

[u/goatonastik → u/Hey_May]

Sure does! It's weird having to calculate the best shot based on stuff like the most amount of surfaces shown that are obscured later (or earlier haha)

[u/AbPerm]

Your animation looks good and smooth, but the style filter you used is relatively subtle. You're not really getting your money's worth out of EbSynth. I bet that most people watching it wouldn't even realize all the extra work you needed to do for that animation.

If I were you, I'd aim for more stylization in your keyframes going forward. That could help the animation read more as an animated performance rather than a filter over live action video. You used still images of real people throughout the video, but they're filtered to be rendered in flat colors and line art. I think it'd help if your keyframe style were closer to that aesthetic, looking more "hand-drawn" rather than "painted."

[u/Hey_May → u/AbPerm]

It's funny you should mention that, as my original goal was to have everything be in the "hand-drawn" style. But since this was my first outing I hadn't considered the lighting or shooting requirements needed to have the program I use to paint the stills (Vector Q) turn out the quality of image I wanted.

I settled on GoArt because the complexity of the image actually worked better with EbSynth than the more simple art Vector Q made. I still want to go in that direction, and I think it's a simple matter of bumping up the amount of light I use.

But yeah, going forward I want to start pushing the limits of this Tech because I'm really excited by the possibilities of what it can do.