Digital Anarchy has released ToonIt! for film and video. ToonIt! 1.0 will create cartoon-like images from film and video footage, freeing artists from time consuming techniques such as hand painting and rotoscoping. The filters use advanced algorithms from Toonamation to create cartoon shading and lines in After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion and Premiere Pro.
“Cartoons, whether full colour images or line drawings, are a natural way for people to express themselves,” stated Stan Schwartz, co-founder and President of Toonamation. “Until now, there hasn’t been a high-quality way to create these effects that isn’t very labour intensive. We’re delighted to bring that capability to end users through the ToonIt! plugin and our partnership with Digital Anarchy.”
With ToonIt!, users can customise the ‘toon’ effect for any footage in a variety of ways. There are four filters in the set. The Roto Toon filter creates flat shades of colour and gives users full control over details like outlines, shading styles and halftone effects. The ‘Outlines Only’ filter uses edge detection to produce cartoon-style edges, removing colour altogether from the footage for a black-and-white comic-book style. Goth Toon makes use of internal colour rotoscoping to create a high contrast effect, while Blacklight Edges’ edge detection creates a fun, customisable set of neon-colored edges.
One of the key features of ToonIt! is its ability to minimise temporal artifacts. Other cartooning software frequently produces an undesirable ‘vibrating’ image that is the result of color regions and lines jittering from frame to frame. In comparison, ToonIt! filters reduce these graphic issues and produce very consistent, pleasing results from one frame to the next. This temporal noise reduction and visual consistency drastically reduce the need to make adjustments via rotoscoping or other manual editing methods. The filters work in After Effects 5.5 and higher, Final Cut Pro 4.5 and higher, Motion 2.1 and higher, and Premiere Pro 2.0 (Windows only) and higher. ToonIt! for Film/Video supports all variants of Macintosh OS X and runs natively on Intel Macs. The product supports Windows 2000, XP Home, XP Pro and Vista 32-bit systems.
A second package of ToonIt! will be released for use in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements later in the year.
Follow us on
