What a wonderful tool. I use it daily to save shots when nothing else will work. It always feels nice to use, gives expected results. Best node.
I vote for pythonic elbows.
Drag brush best brush.
if i got paid a penny per drag brush stroke, Iād be so rich.
Anamorphic footage enters the room.
Resize node shoves anamorphic footage to the sideā¦
Anamorphic is working in 2027.1 (insert AI graphic of someone holding up two thousand and twenty seven and one tenth fingers)
Used to be Clone worked correctly with nonsquare pixels, but recursive clone did not, but I just tested both and theyāre fine. I got a warning when turning on the viewerās Use Aspect Ratio that my strokes would be scaled incorrectly, but even when I flip it on and off, things are fine.
If you like the paint node, you should really give Silhouetteās paint tool a try.
Completely agree @aaaaaaandy With two exceptions:
Desktop paint shift button works better to make straight lines
Desktop paint doesnāt soften picture as much as batch paint.
Other than that, it beats most other paint boxes. That paint restore I just canāt get elsewhere easily.
Do you mean ārevealā?
Actually Silhouette does handle a few things better:
- Silhouetteās ārevealā is that you can offset your source frame by relative/absolute frame number. No need to capture a still. More flexible.
- Silhouette allows you to stabilize the viewer and apply stabilize transform to brush strokes. So you donāt have to stab/unstab the shot with all the downsides of that.
- Silhouette can apply exposure and color correction between source and destination when you clone. Also has āblemishā brush with blurs and regrains in one op.
- Silhouette can run in frequency separation mode when painting by the click of a button
- Silhouette can apply full TRS match moves to paint strokes, not just point tracker
- Silhouette now has 3D tracking and projection. You can paint on a projected card with a few simple nodes in the project. Less complicated than Flameās projection setup.
- Silhouette now has head tracking can can unwrap a face for paint.
- Silhouette can scale. Itās vector based but uses a cache. So after 10K strokes the performance doesnāt collapse
But Flame has the drag brush which is genius. And in Flame itās easy to change the frame range of a stroke. Thatās much more painful in Silhouette.
And Flame runs inline of batch. So there is less overhead and less cost than having another app/plugin.
So Flameās paint is great for small inline jobs, or if the drag brush is needed. For anything complex, Silhouette wins.
Iām with Andy, Flameās paint tool is fantastic. Try to use Paint in Nuke or elsewhere. Itās just that Silhouette has set the standard a long time ago. And Boris has super charged it lately with all their 3D tracking. Theyāre actively innovating and using Silhouette as the app in their line-up where they build most new features first.
I very well might have missed something, but with batch paint, did we not lose the Save function that was in desktop paint? If I wanted to reveal something from the previous frame, on desktop, I would just go to that frame, click Save, then reveal it. Now, when I want to do something like that, I have to put a MUX node in my batch to the previous frame and freeze it, then reveal to that new layer. Which seems to me kind of goofy.
It makes my batches overly complicated with many different frozen MUXāes feeding into a paint node. I think it should be a lot simpler than that.
Ummm, Silhouette has a very nice drag brush too. It also has the advantage of utilizing Mochaās planer tracker to animate strokes that rotate and change perspective.
Hiya Greg- I learned a bit more about the Paint node when I made the video for its update in 2024, and thatās where I learned there is a super simple way to do it, but it comes at the cost of visibility / info. The āLockā checkbox takes whatever frame youāre on and freezes that frame.
When you move the playhead after, and reveal, youāre revealing that frame that you froze (locked). When you unlock it and lock it again, it freezes a new frame. To my knowledge thereās no indication of which frame is frozen currently or which frame was frozen when you painted on it, so itās not very clear exactly what has happened if youāre looking back on it, but if your goal is simple, that might be as simple as it gets.
Hey thanks very much for this, Jeff. Iāll check it out.
you can slip an input, but I always use muxes as you then know what frame youāre revealing
I would just like to add in a world of connecting pipes to nodes and (increasingly) prompting, paint is just so nice to work in sometimes. very therapeutic. I donāt care what anyone else says about you @andy_dill this is a good post.
Hmm, youāre right. Iāll have to try it again. Does it work as well as the Flame one, or is it more of a smear? Flameās version seems to be somewhat uniquely good.
Thereās also the Add Still button which creates the result of your current frame as a source image and connects it to your Paint node as a new layer.
Personally I like Silhouetteās more than Flameās. You can adjust the mix, decay, and smoothness of the strokes independently, so you have a lot of control. I also like that it doesnāt bog down your system if you are painting across many frames.