The
animation application eXposer benefits greatly from Zeta's focus
on multi media capabilities, stability and speed. The developers
made eXposer as they needed a fast, reliable and modern linetester.
eXposer is a quite so feature rich application, so if you are not
familiar with the user interface in eXposer, we recommend that you
turn on Bubble Help in the Help Menu of the main window.
Mostly you will work in the main window. The underlying principle
of eXposer is a separation of media source files and x-sheet entries.
The x-sheet window consists of three main parts: X-Sheet,
Preview and Source Media. You can create an x-sheet
in two ways:
To make an x-sheet if the frames are already on your hard disk
First load the files into eXposer that you want to put into the
x-sheet. Open the folder containing the files in the Tracker
and drag the files into the appropriate list Frames or Sounds.
<screenshot 1>
eXposer will load sound or image files and put them into the correct
list no matter into which list you've dropped the files.
As soon as your files appear, you can drag them into the x-sheet
and drop them onto the right kind of level. A red mark will indicate
the drop position. If you don't see a red mark even if you're dragging
above the right kind of level, that probably means the mark is showing
in a portion of the x-sheet which is currently scrolled out of the
visible region.
<screenshot 2>
In an empty x-sheet, you'll see two levels by default - one for
frames and one for sound. You can either drag source files into
an already existing level, or you can drag files into the empty
part of the x-sheet and a new level of the right type will be created
for you. In the menu Level you can explicitly create new
levels or remove the currently selected level (displayed darker).
To make an x-sheet of an animation that you need to digitize
At the bottom of the Frames page is the Capture
button, which will start the module for capturing frames from your
computers video-in. This is just like "Digitizer" in Take_2. If
you have more than one x-sheet opened, you can still only launch
capturing once, since it is connected to your video hardware, which
can only be used once at a time.
Capturing consists of one window where you mainly see the video
signal of your camera plus a few controls. The menu item Video
-> Device Settings opens the settings panel for your capturing
device. There you can choose the input jack or alter the brightness
of the video for example. To capture frames to your disk, put a
valid directory into the text field Folder and put a filename
into the field below. Place a number in that name somewhere and
eXposer will count that number up as many steps as you supplied
in Steps. The rightmost number will be counted up. So scene01-frame0001
will become scene01-frame0002 after you captured the first
frame. In the X-Sheet window from where you launched capturing,
the frame will appear immediatly in the Frames page. So from
there you can work exactly as described above and drag the frames
into the x-sheet levels.
To play the animation
Leftmost in the x-sheet you see the frame bar. There is a green
and a red mark. These are the start and stop frames. Animation playback
loops always in between the start and stop frames. So to view your
entire animation, right click onto the frame (in its left half)
which you want to be the first frame and right click onto the frame
(in its right half) which you want to be the last frame. Then hit
one of the play buttons underneath the animation preview.
Working with the X-Sheet
The concept of the x-sheet is very easy. You work with individual
drawings of an animation or pieces of sound that have a certain
duration (in frames).
Item Duration
To alter the duration of any item in the x-sheet, just point your
cursor at the lower end of that item so that it changes into up/down
arrows. Then click and drag the item to make it longer or shorter.
If you want to change the beginning of an item, simply change the
duration of the preceeding item. You can also edit the length by
clicking the right mouse button, and then it isn't even neccessary
to point at its bottom. Usually, when you change the duration of
an item, you move the items following that item up or down. But
you can also keep the following items at their positions. There
cannot be gaps between the items, so the directly following item
will automatically be moved, but if you use the middle mouse button
(or hold down CTRL with the first mouse button), a change
of the duration of one item, will only affect the directly following
item by changing that items duration as well. All other items further
down will stay in place. This is especially useful if you work on
storyboards.
Selecting
Items
Of course you can do other things to the items in your x-sheet.
If you left-click onto an item - you select it. All actions available
in the Tools and Edit menu work on the selected items
only. There is no exception to this rule. You can only select items
in the same level. If you select items in another level, you loose
the current selection. More than one item is selected by holding
down the SHIFT (for a continous selection) or the OPTION
key (usually the windows key located between CTRL and ALT,
to the left of your SPACE bar) for a non-continous selection.
If you want to get rid of the whole selection, just click into empty
space.
Sorting Items
You can also change the order of items. You do this by "drag-sorting".
Just click onto an item and start dragging (while keeping the mouse
button pressed). All selected items will stick to your cursor and
you see a red drop mark where you can drop them. Sound and drawings
cannot be mixed of course. Normally you're in move mode, which means
items will be removed from their original position and inserted
to where you dropped them. But you can of course copy items by holding
down shift in the moment when you let go of the mouse button.
<screenshot 3>
Alternatively to working with the mouse, you can make use of your
keyboard. The x-sheet needs to be in focus of keyboard events. In
Zeta, this is indicated by a blue focus frame. Just click into the
x-sheet and it will be "in focus" or use the TAB key to cycle
the focus until the x-sheet has it. Use the cursor keys on your
keyboard to move around in the x-sheet. The blue cursor is always
in between two items. Some keys help you to go to all important
positions (like s will get you to the start frame (but only if there
is an item at the startframe) or e will do the same for the end
frame. Pos1 or End, the keys in the middle of the six keys above
your cursor keys, put the cursor at the first or last item of the
focused level.
By the way, you can remove items from the x-sheet by hitting the
delete key instead of selecting Edit -> Clear, but
if one of the Source Media lists is in keyboard focus, the delete
key will remove all selected source items from the list.
If you want to select items using your keyboard, just hold down
shift while you move the blue cursor. The items it passes over will
be selected (or deselected if they are already selected). Alt-X,
Alt-C and Alt-V (cut, copy and paste)
work as usual. Last but not least, you can use the number keys to
set the duration of the selected items, but watch out that you don't
have Caps-Lock on. + and - make all selected items one frame longer
or shorter.
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