4 CoreMelt PaintX

PaintX Documentation

CoreMelt PaintX allows you to create brush strokes tracked to movement in your video and has many uses.  First here is a quick reference guide to the user interface, then we recommend you look at our video tutorials.

View PaintX Tutorials

User interface overview

Press the “open editor” button after you add PaintX to a clip and the PaintX interface will open the full screen as shown below.  The length of the current shot can be scrubbed using the play controls at the bottom.  Do your paintwork as needed then use the “save changes” button to return to the main FCP X screen with your tracked paint applied to the shot.

Guide to tools in the palette

• Select Tool: use this to transform or move any stroke or layer after it has been created.
• Pan Tool: use this to move around the image if you are zoomed in (see viewer zoom at top right)
• Color Brush: paint with a solid color with adjustable size, softness and blend mode
• Color Adjust Brush: lets you paint on a color correction defined as a difference in hue rotation, luminosity, and saturation from the pixels below it.
• Blur Brush: paint a blur effect with adjustable blur strength
• Smear Brush: this has the effect of “stretching” the pixels in the direction of your stroke with adjustable range, similar to a directional blur.
• Sharpen Brush: Paint a sharpen effect with adjustable sharpen strength.
• Warp Brush: Use this to drag pixel under the brush in the direction of movement to change the shape of objects.
• Clone Brush: Hold “alt” key and click to set the clone source, then click and drag to clone from the source area to the area under the brush.  The offset stays constant for each clone stroke but can be changed with each new stroke.
• Noise Brush: use this to apply a noise texture similar to grain to areas under the brush.
• Heal Brush: this brush paints the texture from the outside of the brush inwards.  It can be used to very quickly remove moles, spots, blemishes or specks of dust.
• Erase Brush: use this to erase parts of strokes within the same layer.  Note you can also select any stroke and press delete key to remove the entire stroke.

ALL CoreMelt System Requirements

For best performance, we recommend you use a graphics card with 256MB of video memory (VRAM). 512MB VRAM is required for rendering HD projects in high precision color or for configurations with multiple high-resolution displays.

The following graphics cards are not supported:

• Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
• Intel GMA 950
• ATI Radeon 8500, 9200

Some Macbook and Mac mini models are not supported due to the more limited feature-set of their built-in graphics accelerators.

Not sure what graphics card is installed in your system?

You can determine what graphics card is installed on your system by selecting the “About this Mac” command under the Apple menu.

When the system summary appears, click the “More Info…” button, which will launch the System Profiler application.

Build 502, June 2019 Update

PaintX now has a The New Shrink Expand Brush and Frame by Frame Painting mode. This is as a free update for existing users.

The Shrink /Expand Brush

Shrink / Expand Brush: push pixels outwards from the point or line drain or pull them inwards towards the line drawn. Use in combination with the Warp brush for a powerful ability to reshape images with tracked distortions

Frame by Frame Painting Mode

Toggle this to draw brush strokes that are only visible on the current frame that is under the playhead.  The default is for strokes to be visible for every frame of the clip.  Frame by Frame painting can be used for repair of image defects that appear in a single frame, for example, dust and dirt on scanned film.  It can also be used to create animated stroke effects such as painting around video frame by frame for a rough animated glitch/glow effect.