MULTIMEDIA ARTISTS and professional animators looking for a great tool for painting on QuickTime movies should check out Strata MediaPaint, Strata's remake of Neil Media's Video Graffiti (see review, November '94, page 56). Although the interface hasn't changed much, MediaPaint now has a slew of new features, including support for Adobe Photoshop and Premiere plug-ins, pressure sensitivity, and alpha channels for masking.
MediaPaint's forte is rotoscoping -- it lets you combine hand-drawn animation effects with QuickTime movies. When you work on a QuickTime movie in MediaPaint, you never actually alter the original footage but instead draw on a transparent layer, which can either be combined with the original or saved separately for use elsewhere or as a stand-alone movie. We found this approach to be superior to that of Fractal Design Painter, with which you have to alter the original footage.
Fabulous Features. Although Painter has more brushes and a larger paper-texture selection than MediaPaint, its animation interface is comparatively simple and it doesn't have the same features for digital artists that MediaPaint does. For instance, MediaPaint lets you paint on a movie while it's playing. You can also record your art as an animation, which makes MediaPaint a great tool for creating titles that write themselves to the screen over time.
Other features include the special Squiggle plug-in, which makes a drawing done by hand appear to wiggle and undulate on command. There is also the ShapePainter tool, which lets you access libraries of sequential drawings and allows you to paint with a brush a library of walking characters, which you can move around in real time while recording their position on each frame. MediaPaint also enables you to create your own brushes.
The most interesting of the new features are the unique plug-ins called Particle tools. These tools are self-animating, and you set the gravity, size, and life span of each particle through a series of dialog boxes. The BabyBoom tool, for example, creates particles that "give birth" to new particles.
Light Table Done Right. Animation programs have historically lacked a true animators' light table, but MediaPaint does it right. When you view multiple frames of animation with MediaPaint's Lightbox, you see different opacities for each layer: Lower-number frames are darker, and higher-number frames are lighter. This process, known as onionskinning, lets you know which range of frames you're editing by their opacity rather than their frame number. The Lightbox feature will enable character animators to move over from analog light tables to a digital painting environment.
We have one item on our wish list -- we'd like to be able to paint directly on alpha channels (a feature not available in any animation program to date). But if you're an animator or a multimedia, video, or film artist, MediaPaint will give you a great visual advantage that's well worth the price.
Strata MediaPaint (4.5 out of 5 mice) Very Good/Outstanding / Price: $695 (list). Company: Strata, St. George, UT; 800-678-7282 or 801-628-5218. Reader Service: Circle #415.
