Scaling and reusing large PSD files in CH

[Martinnel]

Man, am I worried about writing a long post here. This new forum setup has been giving me agita on the Premiere site. But here goes:

My puppet is made of large photographs, basically, 2400 x 4800 pixels. I built it in a PSD file of these dimensions. Cutting out the images—photos were not green screened unfortunately—is much easier at a higher rez and there are other reasons for keeping everything full size. But this is ultimately, way too big a file for Ch to handle in my tired old computer, at least once we've got all the postions and alts, etc. That's fine; I finished building him, duplicated, made the new one a more managable size and that's my little guy.

But here's the thing, when I want a variation, I'd like to be able to Edit Original (⌘E) and get back to the big file. Or, if that's not achievable, to at least be able to do revisions to big guy and then apply all Behaviors, Tags, etc. I don't want to have to make my changes directly in PhotoShop and then reapply all the millions of Ch parameters I've applied to my little guy.

Is this doable? Is my question not clear enough? Should I post this somewhere as a feature request? Do you need more reasons why I care?

Thanks,

Martin

Early 2009 Nehalem MacPro4,1, 2 X 2.6 GHz Quad-Core

OS High Sierra 10.13.6

Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB system drive

32 GB RAM

ATI Radeon HD 4870 GRFX Card

Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K, Driver: 10.11.4

Avid Media Composer v. 2018.11.0

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019 v. 13.1.4 (Build 2)

Adobe Media Encoder CC 2019 v. 13.1.3

Adobe Character Animator v 2.1.1 (Build 7)

Mocha Pro Plug-in v. 6.0.2 build 217.x

Boris Continuum 2019 v. 12.0.4

[David Arbor]

Hi Martin, your puppet is linked to your PSD, so if the high resolution is causing performance issues then you need to be on a lower res PSD. Why not cut your images out in the high res versions, save lower res versions based on the animation comp size, then rig that? When you edit original you'll go back to the lower res PSD, but that's a pretty common workflow. What kinds of variations do you expect to be making that would require going back to the full res versions for?

This is a similar challenge to working with time-lapses and going from Lightroom to Premiere or After Effects. It's just not practical to be exporting 1000 6000 x 4000px images and then try to work with them in real-time; for best performance you'll have to export at 1920x1080, 3840x2160, etc. 

[Martinnel]

davidarbor wrote:

"Why not cut your images out in the high res versions, save lower res versions based on the animation comp size, then rig that? When you edit original you'll go back to the lower res PSD, but that's a pretty common workflow."

Well that is, as I must not have made clear, exactly my workflow. And it does work. But, as I learn Ch, as Ch itself improves and as I get more ideas for things I might want to do with my puppet, I often want to modify the little guy in PSD and some of these modifications can be done better in a higher resolution PSD file. See below.

davidarbor wrote:

"What kinds of variations do you expect to be making that would require going back to the full res versions for?"

Well, for example, I've got my puppet capable of speech only when facing forward. I thought that was enough at first and it was. Now I'd like him to be able to speak in  profile. This means going back into PSD, adding the proper mouth-shapes from my photo pile and cutting out the proper part and fitting it to the head shape. The higher the resolution the vastly easier it is to cut these out.

For example, my puppet has lots of hair dangles when he's facing forward. I'd now like to create those in profile, but they entail lots of fine detail work best done at high rez.

Or, for example, my puppet can walk right and left fairly well. There's a great sample puppet Adobe provides called Wonder Boy that has been rigged to walk forward. If I want to do this to my puppet, I'll have to manipulate several iterations of his legs. OK, I can probably do that at the lower resolution. But what if I then want the puppet in my scene to start far away and walk all the way up to an extreme close up? I'd want a high resolution puppet for this shot so he wouldn't get pixelated when he gets close.

I have more examples, but, hopefully you get the idea.

How about this as an alternate question or possible feature request? Is it possible to copy all (or even nearly all) the rigging, behaviors, dangles and any other parameters you've created for one puppet and apply them to another? Then I could do my modifications to my large PSD, save a copy, import it into Ch and apply the saved parameters and be where I want without all the work of starting over. Is that feature available? I can see lots of other applications for such a feature

Martin

P.S. The forum's spellcheck does not recognize 'pixelated.'

[David Arbor]

Gotcha. So while I do understand your desire to make edits to your puppet at full res, it's also killing your machine's performance. To jump ahead to your last question, no, you can't currently copy all behaviors from one puppet to another; but instead of that, why not make your edits to the large PSD then simply copy all those layers to the lower-res puppet PSD and scale them down? That seems like the most efficient option here. This way you don't have to manage two puppets inside of Ch, one of which will be slow to work on even if you were just trying to copy behaviors, and of all the workflows where you'll have to perform some manual labor, I think this is the least annoying one. As for your feature request, you should post that on the UserVoice website, it's a good one: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911317-character-animator

[Martinnel]

Thanks David. Understand, with the exception of something like the walk forward, I do always use a lower rez puppet with Ch and my performance is fine. It's modifications in PhotoShop that are of issue. I've put in a feature request.  I also saw a similar one there. Do any of these get many votes?

Martin

[David Arbor]

I couldn't say, but I added my vote to your FR, it's one I could have used several times before. The Ch UserVoice isn't nearly as active as AE's or PR's, but maybe that's a good thing. I know the teams read these and consider user requests for future releases, so maybe having fewer overall requests makes them more likely to implement. I'm just a user like you, so it's just a guess, but it's nice when the product teams respond to a UserVoice request.

[alank99101739]

Have you tried using the higher res image and then fiddling with the scene resolution settings? Just wondering if you can crank down the quality during editing for speed, then crank up the quality for the final render. I only use vector files (AI) so never played with the settings. But they did add some settings to try and speed things up from memory.