So the eventual size matters and we calculate back from the size and dpi the customer is going to use or print it on in order to come to a project size. Mostly on order and the output is mostly a printed form, ranging from a postcard to a banner. Something to clarify it seems: I draw mostly still drawings, not animated movies or cartoons. Īs a general rule when upgrading your hardware you should buy a computer with the fastest processor and the most RAM that you can afford. which I'm not sure is really justified these days older Mac hardware was built very solid and would last for years, but nowadays they seem to use cheaper parts than in the past ). I don't have any specific advice on which kind of new computer you should get, except to say I have always preferred to work on Mac OS, so I would recommend Apple computers, but I know others will have a different point of view in favor of Windows (to me the only advantage of Windows is the lower cost of the hardware Apple still charges premium prices for their hardware. Even if you feel you need to scan your original A3 size drawings at 600 DPI (resulting in image files that are 10200 x 6600 pixels ) I think you could safely downscale those images by importing them into a smaller TVPaint project size. TVPaint will run smoother when you use standard pre-set resolutions such as HDTV 1920 x 1080 or 2K Film 2048 x 1556 or 4K Film 4096 x 3112 which are preset project resolutions available in the New Project menu.
Otherwise I can't see the benefit of working at over 4K film resolution 4096 x 3112 (and in fact I'd say for most kind of projects you could work at 2K film resolution of 2048 x 1556 or HDTV resolution of 1920 x 1080. But this wouldn't be for every scene, so for a normal scene with no close zoom-ins you could scan at a lower resolution which would make your file sizes much smaller so TVPaint will run smoother.
The only advantage I can see to ever scanning at 600 DPI would be if you needed to have the very high resolution (7500 x 6300 or up to 10200 x 6600) to perform a long zoom-in from a very wide view to a very close view of a character, therefore you need the line resolution to remain very sharp for the duration of the long zoom-in. 15 layers of drawings at that large size exposed on 1's is going to tend to cause slow, laggy performance. That resolution is quite LARGE, more than 4K film resolution, so I wonder if it is truly necessary to have such a large project size ? Even if you are scanning slightly smaller sized drawings on standard 12 Field animation paper (12.5" x 10.5") at 600 DPI the scan resolution in pixels is 7500 w x 6300 h which is still much larger than 4K film resolution. If you are scanning full size 17" x 11" drawings at 600 DPI then your scan resolution in pixels is 10200 w x 6600 h. Now, about your project, you mention : "I often make drawings with the following characteristics: size A3, 600 dpi, sometimes up to 15 layers, but mostly single frame."īecause there is no DPI in TVPaint projects I assume this means that you draw on paper and scan the drawings, then import the scans in to TVPaint.Ī3 paper is 17" x 11". Have you kept your TVPaint 10 Standard version upgraded so that it is the most recent iteration of TVPaint 10 ? (which is TVPaint 10.5.7 ) If yours is not at version 10.5.7, the first thing to do would be to upgrade it to take advantage of the improved functions and stability. You mention you have been using TVPaint standard for several years. kindly advise me on OS, CPU and MEM also best to stay with Windows or move towards Apple? what type of Apple? iMac or powerbook? do i need to upgrade to 64bit, is that the bottleneck? I want to upgrade, buying a new computer and if necessary a new version of TVPaint also. And it is slow unfortunately up to a point where it has become to slow to continue like this.
Today i often make drawings with the following characteristics: size A3, 600 dpi, sometimes up to 15 layers, but mostly single frame. I have been using TVPaint for a few years now (32 bit TV Paint 10 Standard version, on a windows 7 with Intel Core 2 2,4 GHZ with 8 GB RAM)