[Greg Ercolano]

One suggestion: some of us have ffmpeg, so we can use that to convert individual images to movie files.. just need a hotkey to execute a script we can modify. Perhaps being able to pass as an argument to the script the path to the where the images were last saved and the frame range is maybe all we’d need, e.g.

/some/where/foo.%04d.png 1 200

..where 1 is the start frame, 200 is the end frame, and %04d is the frame padding indicator.

If there’s an .xml, .json, or some other text file that has the info we need, that could work instead.
This would allow advanced users to output movie files in various formats without it having to be compiled into animation paper.

[Greg Ercolano]

I too was going to suggest the frame scrubbing feature, thought I’d add my thoughts to this thread:

In a program I worked on, while the user held a key down, just waving the pen back and forth (without pressing down on the stylus) would roll the frames; right or down movement == forward, left or up movement == reverse, and on release, would return to the frame you were on before scrubbing.

This really is great for productivity when repeating the common paper process of (a) rolling a few drawings, (b) dropping in a line, (c) repeat..

[Greg Ercolano]

A neat feature I added to an animation program I was working on; on macs you can change the transparency of the application window so you can see through to a movie playback program positioned underneath.

In my case I added that option, and a few hot keys to execute unix commands that would send frame advance/frame reverse commands to the movie player, in addition to adding a new drawing. This way one could just roto the frames, hitting the ‘next frame’ button each time which would automatically advance the frame in the movie underneath, and create a new drawing in the animation program.

I found I could do this easily with Mac’s own “DVD Player”.. a simple shell script I called ‘dvdplayer-step’ would send the frame advance command to DVD Player, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
osascript > /dev/null << EOF
tell app “DVD Player”
step dvd
end tell
EOF

To add a feature in animation paper to allow the user to run external unix commands (might be useful for other purposes..!), just allow the user to define simple strings that get executed with system(), and attach them to a hotkey.