RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT-INTRO TO MULTIMEDIA ARTS

 RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT 

[What are the Hardware and Software trend in Multimedia Arts]

( A N I M A T I O N )

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP

Did you know you can make animate with Photoshop? oh you did. Well, I thought I did, too. I used to animate frame by frame with one layer per frame. Which would get pretty confusing if you'd like to animate something with more than just 10 frames. But there is another way called video layers, which can hold all of your frames in a single layer.

KRITA

An open source contender for Photoshop. Where it tries to compete is especially in the realm of digital painting, comics, game assets creation and, just recently in animation. It has great tools for quite a lot creative purposes and a really powerful brush engine, that surpasses Photoshop's in almost every aspect. The user interface is not as clunky as you would expect from most open source.

The animation branch of Krita is still in Beta and will probably undergo significant changes in the recent future, but it's on a good way and works better than Photoshop's timeline already. It has support for customizable onion skins, good keyframes, holding of frames etc is fairly straight-forward and works as you would expect from animation program. Only downside, you can not directly export t a video format or GIF.

ADOBE FLASH

One of the programs, which is still widely used in the animation industry, although not as popular as some others. It has a good timeline although not great, and it is vector based. My views on Flash are highly subjective. I like it when it was the only tool available to me, but I always hated the drawing capabilities. The brush just never feels right, also I don't really like that because it's vector based, but that's a matter of preference.

FLIPACLIP

FLIPACLIP is an animation maker app that replicates and improves upon traditional flipbook-style animation. FLIPACLIP is one of the best animation apps that helps you create cartoon animations. Combining simple yet interesting drawing tools with frame control, it enables the production of impressive animations. With a creative tool such as FLIPACLIP, there are two broad areas where it may be useful in the classroom: art lesson covering animation and other subject lessons using a creative means by which to show and record knowledge. The app also comes with several drawing tools such as brush, eraser and so on. This free animation app gives you the chance of creating your very own video with the use of sketching and imaginations. 

ANIMATION KIT

Animation Kit is an easy to use animation app for creating exciting animation sequences using drawings, photos, shapes and texts. This animation app has ready made templates such as school, beach, forest, town, summer and ocean floor. The application is free but has some restrictions on the additional templates.

This app encompasses all the traditional tools you would expect from a high-quality drawing animation app such as paint palette, shapes, combine video and photos, add music, scale, rotate, color adjustment and so much more. You can make beautiful animations on your iPad in just a few steps.

Using the timeline at the bottom of the screen, the user can adjust the frame to the starting and finishing position and move the shape to animate it. The animation feature is so easy to use and even the youngest users can soon master the animation in time, unsupported by parents and teachers.

( V I D E O  P R O D U C T I O N )

CPU

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the brains of your computer. For video editing this will have an impact on how your video editing software performs. The CPU also will determine your rendering performance. Make sure you have a high speed processor in your editing workstation is critical.

GPU

Your Graphics Processing Unit (Unit) is responsible for rendering images, animations and video to be displayed

on your screen. Since a video editor will be working with lots of video and visual effects, making sure you have a high-end graphics card with maximized video ram will get you the performance you really want.

RAM

Random Access Memory (RAM) is responsible for storing data for the programs running on your computer. Most computers off the shelf come with 2GB of RAM which is not enough for video editing which eats up RAM like crazy. In order to have decent video editing performance you'll need minimum of 4GB RAM but upgrading to 16GB of RAM is even better. Essentially more RAM = faster video editing.

STORAGE

Video files take up a lot of space because they contain large amount of information from the camera. Typical 500GB SATA storage in a computer is not enough so upgrading your storage is a necessity. We recommend adding 2TB or external storage.

MONITOR

You'll need a way to view the video you are working on so having a proper monitor is important to see exactly what your working projects looks like. Choosing a large widescreen LCD Monitor that is compatible with your graphics card is critical.

( D R A W I N G )

AUTODESK SKETCBOOK

Sketchbook from Autodesk is one of the most robust raster drawing apps you will find. Compared to Photoshop, Sketch is a purpose-built platform for artist on the go. It is not meant for photo editing or other tasks, so the program focuses on just what you need to draw on your tablet easily. The program is available for Macs, PCs, and Android devices. Unlike many drawing apps that sick to proprietary or generic formats, Sketchbook conveniently has the option to export to Photoshop PSD format with layers intact. 

AFFINITY DESIGNER

The Affinity set of art apps is poised to take a significant bite out of Adobe's market share. These programs are full-featured to the point of having things you have to buy aftermarket in Adobe. Designer is Affinity's answer to illustrator. It is a desktop vector art program with every feature you could ever want and one of the best drawing apps for Apple computers. Designer is available for Mac desktop or iPad.

INSPIRE PRO

For all the painters out there, Inspire Pro turns your iPad into the ultimate painting canvas. This is one of those simple raster drawing apps that can produce some really fantastic artwork thanks to super realistic brushes and massive canvas size. 

PROCREATE

Procreate is an iOS-only app designed to fully harness the power of Apple's popular iPad and Apple Pencil combination. More than just a drawing app, Procreate combines many of the powerful tool's you'd expect to find in a much more robust program like Photoshop. Layers, costume brushes, and all sorts of special effects are available on your tablet. You can export images, with intact layers, straight to PSD format to open in Photoshop. For on-the-go art, check out the drawing app iPhone version as well.

ZEN BRUSH 2

Zen Brush is a simple ink brush app for mobile devices. A drawing app for free, it is super inexpensive and fun to use, but it is pretty limited. However, ink and paper are limiting too, but that hasn't stopped artists from making amazing artworks with them for the last thousand years.