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This was just me having a little fun while trying out the free program Krita. It’s surprisingly fully featured for a free application and has most things I want for making animations.
Drawbacks:
- It crashed constantly when I was doing animations in 4.6K width. That stopped when I decided to go down to 2.3K (aka 2K with some wiggle-room)
- At currrent time there is no way to export videos with an alpha-channel. I can however export them as png sequences with alpha. so maybe that’s a workaround until official support is added.
- I’m not that fond of how it made erasing a mode of the brush instead of its own thing. It seems like a small niggle. But it has made setting up hot-keys go weird. I can’t just have a button for erasing and one button for brushes. Or can I?
- The color picker is not on the alt-button and when sampled it doesn’t return to the last tool used. I miss that habit from the Adobe-programs.
- That’s about it really.
Anywho… here’s the video of it:
My very own Krita template
I have made my own template for animations. It’s inspired by the animation-templates that are already in the program. But since I am working basically only by myself I have little use of all those color-coded-layers and stuff that is in it. So I scaled things back to simplicity. If anyone wants to use a derivative you are free to download it here:
https://www.jmalmsten.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/MalmScopeAnimation_2Klean_v4.zip
How to install: easiest way would probably to just open the above file and go to file>create-template from image to save the template to your krita-installation.
A few things about it:
It’s based on the DCI standard resolutions. The crop-marks show where the edges of a 2K center-crop will be in different format:
- 2.40:1 – The crop for Cinemascope (1920×854)
- 1.85:1 – The crop for FLAT (1998×1080)
- 1.90:1 – The full DCI resolution (2048×1080.) This is rarely used in regular cinemas but it coincidentally is the shape of digital imax cinemas
I also included a layer group with letterboxes so I can quickly see only what is supposed to be seen.
Why make it oversized?
Well. There are lots of reasons why one might want a bit of wiggle-room in the final image. Ability to reframe the shot in post is often the most common reason. Also panning around the shot is easier when the top of heads is still available for example. And also for wiggling the layers.
Why not 16:9?
Honestly. The 1.85:1 is close enough for those cases when we go to 16:9 aka 1.78:1 aka 1920×1080. I just wanted it to be a cleaner crop-guide so I limited it to the big theatrical ratios.
Can you remove my logo from the tempate?
If you want to leave my website-logo as it is in the template you are free to do so. It’s free marketing for me 🙂 . But if you want to remove it you can easily do that too. It’s a simple paint-layer so just go in there and erase that sucker. Just remember to go to file>create-template from image to save the template to your krita-installation.
Anywho.
Be seeing you!
