Creating Animatics from Drawn & Scanned Storyboards

Hello Pros!

I'm trying to create a series of animatics in FCP and need to know the best possible format in which to save the scanned-in (black and white, hand-drawn) storyboards.

We're cutting at 23.98 fps, 1920x1080 using FCP Suite 2.0. on a Mac Pro:
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005C.B08
SMC Version: 1.7f10
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT

Our final output will be a .mov of the same resolution to be given to execs for approval and then to the team of artists that will be doing all of the 3D animation work. We'd like the animatics to look as high-quality (read: little pixelation if possible) for approval and seamless understanding/workflow reasons.

We'll be bringing the black and white storyboards in via scanner (a Brother MFC-6490cw Color Inkjet All-in-one). And then saving them as _______ ... here's where you come in. What file type? JPEG? JPEG 2000? TIFF? Other?

Any and all advice (along with possible repurcusions of using certain formats) is most appreciated.

Best,
-Travis-

I vote TIFF format. 24-bit RGB TIFF.

- Loren on location

From the options you presented TIFF is the way to go. However, If what you are scanning are storyboards(ie, several panels per page,) and plan to open the pages in Photoshop so as to crop/resize them into individual panels, then PSD is another lossless option.

What program are you doing the animatic in?...Oh wait, FCP perhaps? Duh.

You know you can also add an alpha channel in photoshop to some panels (TIFF or PSD) if say, you want to spice things up and separate the characters from the background, or already have them on separate drawings, and want to do a camera move where the background pans as the characters walk in place, for example. If so, remember to change the image formate from grayscale to RGB prior to saving to retain the alpha.

Rock on,

Jeff P

This is great info! Thanks, Loren and Jeff!

I worked on animatics at Pixar on Nemo and WALL?E.

For Nemo, we would scan the hand-made drawings into Photoshop. The various layers were animated in 2D in After Effects and then imported into Avid.

The way they did it for WALL?E is that they drew directly onto pressure sensitive video screens into photoshop, with various elements on separate layers. They were then delivered to the After Effects artist where there are many more options than FCP for animation, camera moves and having access to various specialty plug-ins. After this process, the rendered files from AE were imported into FCP for fine cutting.

I suggest you use this workflow instead of working directly in FCP.

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