popeye reanimate scene composite test

A friend helped me out a bit with Natron, and it's behaving much better now. Although this is before any filters or effects, so we'll see how much worse it gets. But there's a lot about Natron I love in regards to a raster-based animation workflow and wish other compositing software would borrow:

Image sequence's missing frames can be "filled in" by preceding frames:

You can animate on twos/three/whatever and have long holds, and Natron will play the sequence correctly! Compared to AE's stupid layer-based pre-comps filled with still images that show for only a few frames (or doing wasteful duplicate images to make it a proper sequence).

Frame Hold node: If there's cycles, or reused drawings, it's relatively simple to temporarily go back to those frames and then jump back to where the animation left off. Compared to AE's "Time Remapping" which can mess with the frame rate really easily.

Over/under Merge node: Instead of splitting and duplicating the same drawing to change order, you can keyframe whether a layer is above or under another layer. In this case the fence.

Anyway, there's still some messed up colouring in this test (flickery chest and vest due to really loose rough) so I'll have to go back and tidy that up. Also I'd hate to forget this whole process, so hoping this rambling will serve to remind me in future when I take on bigger projects.

Re: move. Things are getting somewhere now. I painted the walls, and got the animation computer and animation desk in a cosier arrangement (although a lot of dead space behind the paper stacker because of the fireplace; maybe I could use that space for acoustic bass-trapping) and the music computer is basically running (not the outboard/synths/patchbay just yet).

Woe betide the materialist when he is asked to move.

In a few days I'm heading back to the old place to give it a deep clean now that it's empty. I want that deposit!