It’s been a long time now, 16 or 17 years ago, that I began studying animation at the school of Visual Arts. I remember quite vividly that the school bought a license or two of TAKE2 (the first version of TAKE5) for animation department. And Peter who was a computer Savvy took the responsibility of managing the documentation and also installation of the software on an Amiga 2000. I think it was the best thing ever happened to the department. The simplicity of the software on one hand and the efficiency of it on the other hand made it capable of doing everything an animation department needed at that time, for example, line-testing and stop motion animation including (pixilation, sand animation, cut-out, puppet animation, etc). So if you are in college and are interested in studying animation, I recommend you to work with this software. This software reduces the complexity of its components and let you simply concentrate on learning and analyzing your animation. However it takes you one step further and let you produce your short film quite professionally as well .
Let me take you through this software to see how it works.

The workflow consists of 4 steps. Capture, Edit, play and save.

To capture or grab the images, we need to set the Video source. However Take5 automatically recognizes the video connection, but you can select one of the provided sources.

1. In doing so, go to Menu bar and choose Settings > Video source. From the Dialog box, select the type of input, quality of images and etc. In case you are using Take5 for Line-testing, I suggest reducing the colors as few as possible. So you can composite more levels with each other, so the superimposed images can be seen easily.

2. Under the camera, place your Line-test drawing .Click on the “Level” button in the Tool Panel. A dialog box is displayed. Change the “name-field” or accept the default. Hit OK.

3. Now begin to “Grab” all drawings of the new level. Capture each drawing just once .You can use “regrab”to grab the current image with the last grabbed name. The captured images will be displayed in “Media” panel.

4. To edit the grabbed images, click on “editor” in the “xsheet” part of the tool panel. Here you can see which images are to be played at each frame of the scene. For every grabbed image 2 “cells” have been created in the corresponding level.

5. For quick editing, select some “Cells”. Click on the duplicate button, and then click on the selected image/images. To remove them, click on remove button.
Click-hold the middle mouse button over a cell and drag it to change the timing.

6. For advance editing, select some “Cells”, and then click on “edit …” button in the Tool Panel. A dialog box is displayed.

7. In the “timing-field’ set the number of times to repeat each Cell. And in the “repeat-field” set the number of times to repeat the range.

8. To add “blank frame/s“ set the number of blank frame/s in “before or after” field.

9. Add another “Level” and repeat the step 3.

10. Set the “rank” to change the stacking order.

11. Click on the red button to make the corresponding level visible or invisible.

12. To add sound to your Media, take5 loads all wave (.wav) files that it finds in the My Documents/My Sounds folder.
The sounds appear automatically in the media list at the left side of the Take5 screen.
You can switch between the sounds and the images with the scrollbar at the bottom of the list.
To add sounds to the xsheet, select them in the list and click on the ‘add’ button under the list.
The sounds can be moved in the level column with the middle mouse button.
The editing tools that work on images work on sounds as well.

Now I am going to show you one of the Take5 features that make this software outstanding among others: the “light-box”.

To see how it works, I provided you with a small cut-out animation.

1. Activate the “grabber” in the Tool Panel. From the Menu bar select Settings > options…. A dialog box is displayed.

2. In the “light-box” field set the image to mix with the live video.

3. Now begin to relocate the cut-outs under the camera and grab the images.

Previously grabbed images can be reviewed with the left and right arrow keys while the live video is shown.
Pressing the F11 key will loop the images selected in the media list, including the live video image.
Pressing the F12 key will play the complete scene or the last second(s) once, including the live video image.
You can set this in the Settings>Options>Player>Play Once. It works from the xsheet and player as well.

Explore the features of this option.

Another feature which I like a lot in take5 is the option for exporting the timing.txt into Adobe Aftereffects.

1. To export the “timing.txt” into Aftereffects, save the scene in Take5.

2. Switch to Aftereffects and import the pictures as sequence.( the pictures are saved where the scene is saved.)

3. From the Menu bar choose Composition > Composition Settings. Make sure the frame rate and the duration of frames are the same as your Take5’s xsheet.

4. Select the layer in Time-line panel, and then from Menu bar choose Layer > Time > Enable Time Remapping ….

5. Open “Timing.txt” which is saved where the scene is saved. Copy the content of the file.

6. In Aftereffects select the Time Remap layer and paste the “timing.txt” into it.

You may also find more useful information at www.cellsoft.be.
I would also like to thank Geert Vergauwe who provided me with this information.

animatrick

Tags: Adobe Aftereffects, animation, cellsoft, Take5, timing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 3:23 am and is filed under Articles Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.