Comic Book Look

Brandon Rice

Brandon Rice

Distributed Producer
Not sure where to post this. But does anyone know the post-process in order to get video images looking like their from a comic book?
 
Probably the easiest way is to use Studio Artist but it is going to be more Scanner Darkly-like. You may need to hire an artist to do more detailed work if you want the characters adjusted to look funnier.
 
It's actually very difficult, very costly and very time consuming. The company (don't remember their name, sorry) that do it actually use a proprietary software. There is actually a feature film coming out soon that use the same process.
 
One way to do it is take a frame of video and get it to look the way you want in Photoshop using a small number of filters and layers. Make an action out of the procedure and then a droplet(.exe).

The section you want the effect applied to can be exported out of your nle as frames. I'd recommend you drop the frame rate to 10-15 so you export less frames and make it move more like animation.

Apply the droplet to those frames and then when it's done, bring it back into your NLE and render a clip out of it. Just be sure you set the frame duration for each imported frame to match whatever frame rate you exported the original raw frames as.

Might not be the best or easiest way, but it can get the job done.
 
Cartoon

Cartoon

Creativecow.net has a tutorial by [FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]Aharon Rabinowitz. He uses After effects and illustrator to complete a cartoon from video effect. Might be what you are lookin' for.

Cheers
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For the ultimate comic book look you can't do it on post you have to do it in production and the trick is SPANDEX lots and lots of SPANDEX it's what all good comic book superheroes wear:Drogar-Dum(DBG):
 
ProjX v2.0 said:
One way to do it is take a frame of video and get it to look the way you want in Photoshop using a small number of filters and layers.
Click to expand...

Brandon, what ProjX mentioned is sound advice.
An even MORE SIMPLE way to do this would be to, like in ProjX suggestion, to first save the video as individual images, then take those images and simply reduce the amount of colors to 32 or even 16, depending on your subject matter. You can either do this in Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro, or for a super simple trick, sinly save the pics as GIFs with 32 (or 16) colors.
 
I've done this already. It's very time consuming but not very hard to do:

Get Adobe Illustrator CS2. in the program there is a function called "Trace Image". It converts bitmaps to vector art. has tons of settings and you can make the images look anyway you want them.

So here's what you do:

- edit your movie
- export the movie as a TGA sequence
- import one frame to Illustrator
- use the "actions" function to record your Trace Image edit
- save your Trace Image action
- open the folder with your TGAs in Adobe Bridge
- select all files and click "Batch Edit"
- in Batch Edit you'll find that you can use any of the saved actions from Illustrator. Choose the one you just made
- Batch Edit the whole wack of files
- Wait a few days while the thing edits (not kidding - this step takes for EVER)
- once complete, import the image sequence into Premiere as an image sequence
- export to a video file

I believe this is how they made those stupid Charles Schwab commercials ("Talk to Chuck"). The method works but if you have something longer than a few minutes I strongly suggest you do one scene at a time or you'll lock up your computer for weeks.

mor10
 
Scharky did something similar with DVX footage in Photoshop awhile back, hit him up with a PM to find out the photoshop actions.
 
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