this is Ebsynth it's a piece of free software that let you apply a single
painted frame of a video and apply that effect to the whole scene in their
examples they use it to add a painterly looked real footage and because I'm an
animator I thought i bet you could do that too some animated footage and get some cool
results and maybe be able to change the style of a whole animation with a single
frame so let's give it a shot
here's the basics of how I be sent works you need a PNG sequence of your original
scene which you can render out from after-effects and then you need a PNG of
the frame you wanted to take the style from which is your key frame now this
isn't an artificial intelligence software that can invent how objects
might look that aren't in your reference key frame it takes the information from
that key frame and applies motion from the footage your stylized key frame
needs to match the content of the original footage pretty closely with
Ebsynth open you select the folder where your key frames are select the
folder where your original video PNG sequences so with the output folder
where you'd like it to be rendered and know down here what frame your key frame
is click synth and you're good to go they've got a much more in-depth
tutorial on their site but they go into multiple key frames and more details so
check that out too now let's get to our experiments the first thing I did was
take their test footage of this small domesticated kitten and applied a much
more stylized version to test where the breaking points would be and this turned
out a lot better than I expected besides the side of its face here at the
end the rest looks pretty good and we could fix that by including
another key frame with a cat in this final position here but I was pretty
keen to go ahead and test it on the simpsons which I've got two different
scenes to show you the main benefit of this software is how much integrity of
the style it keeps in the moving footage which is amazing that does mean that you
do have to provide it with a frame created specifically for this purpose so
some illustration or digital painting skills are required but hey I traded a
few dozen thousand dollars and four years of my life for an art degree so
let's put that to use I picked this scene from The Simpsons but that might
be afraid of smothering him yeah and then we get the chair and I picked the
sequence with Homer because there's a little bit of movement in his shirt and
head and a bit of lip sync but not too much more going on so this should be
some pretty easy testing grounds I picked this key frame and painted this
in Photoshop it took maybe an hour or so including the background my goal was to
see if I could turn this short scene into this overly rendered strange faux
3d version of The Simpsons so when I applied that keyframe to our footage and
render it here's what it looks like
"I might be afraid of smothering him yeah and then we get the chair"
not not not too bad it's way better than I thought
it was to be honest the pupils are going
missing at the end here are the most frightening but I think we can go in and
fix that by just adding a shape layer and changing their positions a bit the
movement of the head and the shirt I think is really good it loses some of
the hair but that's understandable when you get to a certain age and it's
interpretation of the mouth closed and variations of the mouth shape overall
pretty good despite being a bit you know a bit janky in some areas it handles the
mouth with no visible teeth fine but when we get to the view where we see the
full mouth of teeth that's when it starts to struggle because we didn't
have that information in a keyframe but overall the mouth looks pretty good now
let's try some other inputs here's a keyframe with an extra eye and a
stretched muscle and this is up kind of like you'd expect the extra elements
I've added kind of get ignored because there's no equivalent lad marks on the
original footage so there's no 2d motion for them to really be tracked to an
upside-down head works about the same so does this version with a Bart head and
some glitchy ones as well this one that I did with a liquify tool in Photoshop
is the most horrifying the way it looks like the pupils go away and roll up into
the back of his head and the way the mouth kind of stitches together is very
very unpleasant I don't really like that at all I usually tried adding some more
realistic lighting to my animated bat logo which went okay but there are quite
a few artifacts which will require a fair bit of cleanup before it was
actually usable and I did a more stylized grainy version as well with
about the same results this is the second Simpson scene I chose what
happened here oh nothing much just a little incident involving the boogeyman
I chose the scene because it has a lot more animation with Homer and see how Ebsynth
would handle that I painted over home in a bit looser with some more
dramatic lighting and this one as well then a lot better than I thought it
would what happened here oh nothing much just a little incident involving the
boogeyman now obviously a lot of these frames don't look great it's got a lot
more areas where the animation breaks because there's more animations and I
only provided one keyframe but I suspect painting more keyframes and adding those
to Ebsynth would help a lot with those but for just one key frame of reference
I was pretty blown away by this of to be honest and I do absolutely think
that there will be professional uses for this type of software on animated
footage in the very near future please let me know down in the comments what
other animated properties you'd like to see me vandalize for this and some other
cutting edge software I'll see you in the next video
subtitle: Zoe J Marriott