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LiveToon from DVShade: A Review from Luke Price

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Noise Industries Review at Creative COW

Creative scope
If you don't want to make the next 'A Scanner Darkly', don't write LiveToon off yet. There is creative potential to add panache to any number of projects needing that 'something a bit different' from full frame live action to composite shots and sequences, including programme title, music videos, commercials and the ever effect hungry corporate videos. Not to mention wedding films and those home movies with the kids, who love it.

Below: Mystery Toon, gives a familiar look.

Drawing things together.
For those who will bemoan that they can do this using a combination of other effects, time and talent, good on ya, that's not really the point of buying a plug-in like this. You could rack and stack a pile of other filters to achieve similar looks, but here DVShade has done the hard work for you. LiveToon is about making great looking and convincing animation inspired effects quickly, it does a great job of that.

As a quick tip, if you are after an animated look to your live action then I have found adding a De-interlace filter and Strobe filter (set to Strobe Duration = 2) makes for good 'drawn' animation.

Proof read it first.
As a partner in the Noise Industries FxFactory line up you know you are getting top quality plug-ins that will work efficiently and effectively with in your program using the FxFactory plug-in manager. Brilliantly, as with all plug-in from Noise Industries and their partners, you don't have to take my word for it, you can trial LiveToon your self for 15 days on your machine and projects, for free. Download the FxFactory software you can test any of the 150 plug-ins on offer. In addition there are a handful freebie's to keep. You can download FxFaxtory and LiveToon from the Noise Industries site www.noiseindustries.com or DVShade www.dvshade.com for your free trial, but even at $49 this plug-in has a lot to offer for a very reasonable price.

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•

Because cartoons are not real, the closer to real they look, the less effective they are
by Ron Lindeboom

Hi Luke, others may have a differing opinion (and they are entitled to whatever opinion they hold on the subject) but as for me, I find that when cartoons are too close to real, they lose their effectiveness. That is why I like to see people start by shifting the frame count in a cartoon. Doing this harkens back to the days when cartoons were hand-drawn and they would shoot a photograph of the hand-drawn frame and make two of each frame. That way, cartoons were 24 frame movies but were really 12 frames with duplicate frames and that became the normal "brain processing" that generations equated with cartoons. When "A Scanner Darkly" came along (opening the door to things like the Charles Schwab commercials, et al), they used the full frames available -- 24 frames for the movie and 30 for the commercials -- and so the motion screams to the brain that this isn't a cartoon, it's a video or film that has been repainted to look like some kind of not-quite-cartoon. When I see techniques like you have done here, Luke, and the artist takes the time to first get the frame motion correct, I have seen some good work. When it is done like the Charles Schwab commercials, my skin crawls as it is too creepy for me. We were just at Dreamworks Animation this week to see a preview screening of "How To Train Your Dragon" and they were talking about this very phenomenon -- where animation tries to get too close to reality -- and they said that when that happens at DreamWorks, they throw out the whole scene and start over. They don't try to fix it. I thought it was great advice.

•

Bessie is cartoonified!
by Kathlyn Lindeboom

I have to say I had fun trying all the different settings on Bessie... and that was just the presets. There's certainly a lot more to it than just the presets.

•

Cartoons are not real - Discuss
by Luke Price

I'm totally with you there Ron. Making a significant alteration to live action like LiveToon often calls for some re-calculations on timing even if it's only a De-interlace. It is really down to the look you are after but I would recommend anyone to play around with frame rates to get realistic cartoon motion (if that's not an oxymoron)

Greatly appreciate your input Ron.

•

A little recommendation before cartoonifying a video...
by Ron Lindeboom

One of the things that I absolutely hate about cartoonified video is when users do not take the extra step to "re-time" the frame rate so that it mimics the motion that you expect from a cartoon. The Charles Schwab commercials are so "30 frames a second" that they give me the creeps. I hate 'em. I found in my own cartoonifying efforts that using a tool like After Effects to posterize time down to 8 to 12 frames a second gives a believable timing that doesn't look like someone just slapped a cartoon filter onto full frame rate video. Retime the video before before you cartoonify it. Please. All of these 30 frame a second full motion cartoons give me the creeps.

:o)

A very good article and nice points you make in it, Luke. I hope you don't mind my suggestion.

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