I discovered this software has a free beta version for Windows, Mac and Linux. Wondering if any Gimp Chat members have tried it?
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/davinciresolve/#

Sorry this gets bumped to the top of Gimp Chat because I seriously believe in using Gimp only for graphic design.

Yes, I tried it about 6 months or so ago, I found it hard going, very complicated GUI (for the inexperienced user), I wasn't sure where to start - in the end I uninstalled it, maybe it's because I didn't have the patience at the time. Saying all that i could see it's a very powerful tool for editing video etc, seems to mainly concentrate on colour correction but from what I remember there were a whole load of features that would be invaluable to a professional, for my limited usage I thought it was a bit over-the-top, but it's definitely a well designed and well put together package.
Top-notch stuff, just a bit too awesome for me!!

I downloaded the Linux version, but never bothered to install it. I've read a few posts that say audio playback in the Linux version is broken. I already have some pretty powerful free video tools at my disposal already, so I'm not missing much from what I can see....

Have at it, if you will. Maybe you can figure out the audio issues.

I'm looking for something that can do foreground extract on multiple layers. I want to have people walking in front of
Gimp animations on screens. I can do it frame by frame but when you have to extract 70 or 100 frames it gets really tedious.

I'm interested in the fact DaVinci Resolve includes the Fairlight digital music tech developed in Australia in the 1970's and 80's.
It was bought by Blackmagic Designs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_(company)

What you want is called a Track Matte. Most video editors can do that, even Kdenlive.

Example:

Obviously, depends on the form of the backgound

A similar question came up yesterday on another forum. A 100 frame animation with a green matte.

You can get a reasonable result (not perfect, depends a lot on the image) using G'mic
screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/raHEmBD.jpg
and a replacement background http://i.imgur.com/PJXGYWm.jpg Ofnuts tools

Thanks rich2005. Unfortunately the clip I'm using hasn't got a green matte background. It's a guy walking across a room in an art gallery that will have animated GIFs 'hanging' on the walls. He will be walking in front of one of the animated GIFs. It will be 3 animated GIFs merged into one. The only static part is the room.

I found 2 almost undocumented Gimp-Gap components in Layer>Transparency>'Foreground extract' and 'Foreground extract by selection'. I'm using the second one but it takes time to do all the frames. I trace the outline with free select and everything else is removed to alpha. The results are good.

racer-x. That is a really cool effect. I find it hard to work-out how it was done.

I would like to make a comment on modern art in my GIF. Some art galleries have glorified lego blocks being presented as art.
This is what I mean:

The walls of this gallery are the art work and people take it seriously.

It's pretty simple actually. I made an animated mask in Krita (but you can do it in any image editor like gimp). I did a screen capture while painting white over a black background. I then imported the screen capture into Kdenlive, cropped and adjusted to use as a mask.

Here are the project files. Unpack and load the Kdenlive project file. You should see how it was done.

hi racer-x



I opened the files in kdenlive and realised I could use an animated background. Had to render it as MP4
and then opened in Gimp where I didn't really get the sponge right. Had to use GAP and Wills Script Pack Animation Merge.

I found I could reduce the finished GIF from 10.7Mb down to 1.5Mb with this command:
gifsicle -O3 animation.gif -o animation-optimized.gif

You need sudo apt-get install gifsicle
The '-o' is just the output file.

Here's a better one. This animated gif was encoded with ffmpeg.....

Yeah I like that.
I'll have to do some more in kdenlive and I have a 'blind spot' around layer masks.

There is a bug in Kdenlive when animating a track above the matte track. If you look at my project, you will see that I have that track muted. Un-mute that track and see for yourself. The work-around is the render to intermediate with animation track muted. Then delete tracks 1 and 2, then import intermediate into track 1. Un-mute and render out.

The "RACER-X WUZ HERE" text effect was made using blending modes.

The ffmpeg command I used:

When you say 'un-mute' I guess you mean audio? I couldn't see any difference with Kdenlive v17.04.1.


Thanks for that command. I've been using this script to convert video to GIF. (when I remember to use it)
https://github.com/thevangelist/FFMPEG-gif-script-for-bash

No, I mean the Video track. The video track-4 (sponge animation) is muted/disabled.