Synfig Project Forum

XDDD WebM export, anyone?

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Isn't that just a video format (no vectors)?

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www.rylanderanimation.se
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Yeah, but that's also the best video format to be played on HTML5. Hey, Youtube's doin it!

But I like Nikitakit's idea. If it isn't possible to export vectors then if somehow we could batch-trace them it would be awesome. Regardless there have been opensource libraries to help pack files into SWF.

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Bartimaeus: "One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror."
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I think that is not such a good idea...
First synfig files is already vectors (if not working with imported images), exporting these to bitmaps, then trace these back into vectors is just dumb. The resulting shapes will be far from optimized. To get proper shaper with tracing tools you need very high settings which also makes for large file sizes, then you can just as well go with movies to start with.
Second the shapes will not stay true to your original artwork, even if the settings is very high there will be differences.
Third, what makes flash vector format so good and usable for web is that the shapes is altered through time, it's animated at playback, thus keeping file size very low. If tracing images it would still be a series of images, but vector images stacked up rather than bitmaps in a movie file.

If it can't be done properly, as animated svg or flash swf files I think it's not worth putting time and effort in. The result will be far from optimum and not very useful. But it is your time, do what you want with it.

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www.rylanderanimation.se
Synfig scripts, etc.

No, Rylleman, you're quite right. Working with vectors, exporting to bitmap and retracing them indeed is quite dumb which is why I was thinking of resolving this by working with both Synfig and Flash to begin with, i.e. Synfig to animate while Flash to composite. Then again you're right about the filesize, though that could be compressed by 25% if we convert all traced vectors to "shape" in one layer, thereby making it somehow morph without making the output weird. The traced output, and what we make in Synfig, should be flat for this to work, and all the gradients and lights to be applied in Flash. Once again this is a tedious process but it's all we've got currently.

Another alternative would be to actually be able to export the animation from Synfig to Silverlight instead. There have been libraries to do that, if I'm not mistaken, and they're written in C++/C# (I think). But it would still be neat to have WebM export (although no worries, because there is a converter in Ubuntu which is capable of converting any video to WebM for playback; yet again it's not necessary because Youtube already does it for free LOL).

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Bartimaeus: "One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror."
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Looks like we need to update to the latest FFMpeg and add an option in Synfig Gui.
http://newteevee.com/2010/06/17/ffmpeg-goes-webm-enabling-vp8-for-boxee-co/
Chris

The more and more that I understand synfig and SVG the more I see just how complicated this really is.

I found a great resource to animate SVG using Javascript called RaphaelJS http://raphaeljs.com/

I saw someone animate svg nodes using Raphael http://vimeo.com/13564252 and it would be great to find a gui that could do this instead of having to hand code it all.

The idea is really simple but implicating it to render like a synfig animation would be hard.

You could put all the nodes in each keyframe into a matrix like this guy did and then use raphael for the in out effects.

Current ffmpeg target parameters GUI allow use a custom video codec so it should work with this new ffmpeg addition.
-G

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Well, if you are on an animation team in which everyone else uses Flash, but you do not (because you're on Linux, or do not have enough money, or you do not want to pirate it). I am in such a situation; the rest of the team uses Flash. However, I do not believe the Flash IDE is supported on Linux. In order to contribute I have been making SVGs in Inkscape and converting them to SWF with swfmill.

Otherwise I agree with you.

Why dont you try pac-n-zoom and make SVG animation yourself within minutes.