by Nurd » Fri Aug 08, 2003 12:43 pm
I do it with Cinepaint, it's the same program I use to stop peoples lips from moving in my video in places they should'nt be (well not in the video I have posted to the .org mind you, but the one I'm working on now). So what Cinepaint allows you to do is take a sequence or a couple sequences of bmp or tga or any number of filmstrip type files and edit them. So you might be thinking, hell photoshop, the gimp, even mspaint let you do that! The key is, in Cinepaint you can easily just hit [ or ] to go to next/previous frame, and you can play the video, autosave backups, etc etc. So to answer your questions more directly here's what I do.
Find the scene I wish to put said character in, either in a movie, or hell a still image will work just as well depending apon the scene. Then clip the scene of your character moving around in the way you wish him to, and save that as an image sequence. Load the sequence into cinepaint, open background image or sequence as well. Select, cut, paste, next. Then if your using a still image you have to reopen your original scene again unless your cutting and pasting both into a whole new sequence. It can be a serious pain in the ass, especially since the damn thing crashes constantly in windows (being that it wasn't originally windows native software, it was written for Linux and ported).
Now I'm sure that there are other programs that do this sort of thing, for all I know photo-shop might be able to do it, given the right plugin(s), but cinepaint is free, and pretty easy to make basic use of with only an hour or two's practice.
Nurd