I’m using Procreate to make short animations, which I’d like to use in Ableton with eboSuite. It’s really important that they include the alpha channel, so that I can layer them with a still image background.
Procreate exports to animated .png or .gif, which can include the transparent alpha channel, but I can’t figure out how to get those into ebosuite with the alpha channel intact. ebosuite doesn’t seem to accept either .png or .gif, and I can’t find a way to convert them. Quicktime player supposedly has this feature on Catalina, but like many people doing audio, I can’t upgrade yet because of other software.
Is there some way to convert the .png sequence file to hap alpha for ebosuite?
Hi Chris,
Ableton dropped support for image files in clipslots in recent versions of Live (it worked in Live 9). However, it still works in eSampler and eSimpler for png and jpg files. You cannot play a sequence of files though.
I don’t know what an easy way is to convert png or gif files to a video with alpha support. Prores 4444 is also an option for a video format with support for alpha which works will wit EboSuite. I will take a look what the options are and report back. EDIT: do you have access to Photoshop? alternatively you can use the free software Blender. I used this in the past. I hope it also supports prores 4444 or hap alpha (both of these codecs first need to be installed before they show up).
Btw, a temporary workaround might be to play with GifToSyphon which lets you stream gifs to a syphon source (also from the web).
Hi Chris, you can use video compositing/editing software like After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut Pro as well. I use QuickTime 7 Pro and AVF Batch Converter a lot to convert videos to Hap with alpha for EboSuite, but these programs don’t support gif. We are going to make tutorial about converting video for EboSuite, we should add converting gif too. I will look around for some apps that we can add to the tutorial for this.
Hi Jeroen and Timo,
Wow, this has been a journey… I was able to get the .png sequence into final cut pro and then render it as prores 4444, which worked in eboSuite. If there is a tutorial or a simpler way I’d love to know. Thanks for the help.
In general, HAP is based on the same compression algorithm as the DDS image format. Likewise, HAP Alpha can be compared to DDSA and HAP Q to the YCoCg format. For that reason content encoded as an DDS image sequence (with [snappy compression] provides an extremely similar file size as a HAP file does and shows the same playback performance.
So, another question, is HAP Q, slower than HAP Alpha?
I don’t know the difference in performance (also there is a quality setting in Hap alpha that might affect this comparison), for Hap Q alpha it is stated the files will be bigger, so at least you need more harddrive bandwidth.
Hi bullt, that is really weird that you do not see Hap Q alpha when you use the latest version.
I took another look and wondered something else, do we look at the same list?:
Hap Q doesn’t show up in the list under ‘load saved settings’.
It does however show up when you click the ‘settings’ button in the codec drop down menu. (edit: from your screenshot it indeed appears you look at a the wrong list)
No eConvert uses Hap Alpha for alpha videos.
Is there any particular reason for you to try this codec? We actually never needed it in our projects.
