The longevity and stability of MediaPaint is a testament to both the true usefulness of the program and the programmers at Strata. Although MediaPaint predates the whole digital-video revolution, it is a program that has finally come into its own. MediaPaint is used for painting on video frames of existing movies or creating animation from scratch on a frame-by-frame basis. It offers many similar tools as other painting programs such as the airbrush and brush, but it also includes some very specific and video-oriented brushes.
Painting on an existing movie works nondestructively. When a movie is opened into MediaPaint, a "paint layer" is created above the existing video frame. This layer is where the painting operations are placed. When it's time to save your work, it can be saved as a MediaPaint document that is the paint layer only and contains a pointer to the imported movie on which you painted, or it can save a new movie. The new movie is a copy of the source movie but with the paint layer now merged into it.
Some of MediaPaint's highlights include a terrific Fire brush with fully customizable settings, an outstanding lightning and electric arc brush, and a Fireworks brush. All of these are animatable and easily customized, and few other programs have such features that are so easy to use.
The program also features a "lightbox" or "onion skinning" feature. Turning this on allows the animator to view previous and future frames while painting on the current frame. Frames can also be inserted and deleted on the fly, making it relatively easy to create animation and adjust its timing.
Although showing its age, the program still does a great job at frame-by-frame painting. Although it was written several years ago and thus lacks some of the contemporary tools or shortcuts we take for granted, it can open the latest QuickTime movies compressed with the DV codec and add effects to them.
MediaPaint is basically a one-trick pony, but it does it very well and very fast. If you're doing any kind of frame-by-frame painting or rotoscoping, MediaPaint is worth a look. --Mike Caputo
