Otherware/Otherware_1_SB_Development.iso/amiga/video/dctv/dctv_dpa.lzh/DCTV-DPaint.DOC

Text File | 1991-04-15 | 4KB | 78 lines

EDITING DCTV WITH DELUXE PAINT - Tips by L. Parent

The paint program included with DCTV is not well-suited for performing
certain manipulations of digitized pictures, especially those captured
from video tape or live TV.

SCAN LIVE TV???              Yes, you CAN digitive from live TV as long
as you have a noise-free TV channel to capture from, and a picture that
holds still or nearly still long enough to digitize.  Set quality = std
and speed = 3 for the shortest scan time.  You can also do a trick with
a video recording: run the tape past the picture you want, scan part of
it (with pause) and then rewind, re-run, and scan a little more, until
the "time-base correcting" box appears.

Pictures digitized by DCTV from either live or paused video sources will
often have shifted scan lines in the picture, sometimes only a few but
sometimes too many to give a usable picture.  When only a few of these
shifted lines are present, it would be desirable to somehow un-shift them
and have an error-free picture.

DCTV Paint- No good!
I tried this with DCTV Paint:  suppose I could grab a "clip" the size of
a single scan line so I could reposition it?  The attempt caused the
program to crash.  Also, DCTV Paint is too memory-intensive to edit any
pictures that are interlaced on 1 meg Amigas.

Deluxe Paint - solution!
Knowing that DCTV pictures are really normal hi-res pictures (sort of),
it should be possible to edit such a picture with DPaint, which has no
problem grabbing a 1-pixel high brush, and can handle any resolution with
1 meg systems.  This allows correcting the scan lines as brushes (hit F3
to make the grabbed line solid).  Then move the line over (usually to the
left) and line it up with the rest of the picture.

Making it visible
The drawback of editing DCTV with DPaint is that there is control info
on the top and left edge that DPaint's menu and toolbox will conceal.
Either use F9 and F10 to toggle them and use keyboard shortcuts instead
of menu selections, or use the cursor keys (up and left) to bring in the
upperleft corner of the picture BELOW the menu bar where it will become
visible.  Note that the menu and toolbox are not visible on the DCTV out-
put, so you will have to switch displays to access some functions.  My
1084 monitor has a button to accomplish this.

Other exciting possibilities:
What about video titling on a DCTV picture with DPaint?  If you toggle out
the menu bar but not the toolbox, it appears that pure black and pure
white are available as colors - they are in the palette and are seen on
the composite screen, so why not use them?  Text in video is often white
with black shadowing.  Draw a rectangle with the right mouse button to
blank out a large central area of the screen (be careful of the edges)
then load a font, pick white from the palette, and type some text.  Take
it out as a brush and put an outline around it. Load a picture, and use
the line tool to drag it a short diagonal distance, and you have a title!

You can also cut and paste with DPaint:  cut a rectangular brush and use
F3 to solidify it.  This can be saved as a brush, and note that it may be
pasted on ANY DCTV picture that has the same # bitplanes and interlace
choice - no need to worry about the matching the palette or remapping.
You can even use irregular brushes but this is done much differently: go
to the toolbox and select the brush tool twice, go back to the DCTV dis-
play and cut out the irregular shape as usual.  Since background color is
transparent, and using F3 puts an unwanted black field behind the brush,
another method is used.  The O key is used to put a 1-pixel outline on
the brush which somehow fills in the missing pixels inside the brush.
When (and if) the outline is removed, the inside remains solid, and this
brush can now be tacked down as an irregular shape.

The possibilities are endless:  have a favorite TV star?  Scan him in, cut
him out from the background, and put him in a picture with you!  Or write
snappy quotations around ones you hate, etc.  Just one thing - it's best
to use overscan with TV pictures to get them all in, but DPaint has a
problem recognizing overscanned DCTV pictures - you should pick overscan
as a DPaint screen mode ahead of time, and when loading in an overscan
picture, just say NO when asked if screen format should be changed.  You
will want a blank "bulletin board" to stick pictures onto so from DCTV
Proc save a BLANK SCREEN in the desired resolution.