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The Firka software is a linetest tool for cartoon
animators. The linetest or pencil test is a working phase of the
traditional animation, when the pencil-drawn pictures are
shooted by a camera, then these pictures are played by a projecting plan,
called exposure sheet. This exposure sheet contains more than one levels.
The linetest is an important checking phase because the corrections of
the mistakes are really expensive in the following phases of the working
process (painting, post-production) even in money and in time. The animator
also uses the linetest as an animation tool.
In the beginning, the making of the linetest was very similar to the final film shooting: they used film cameras with black-and-white negative film. The next step was the developing some special devices, like video recorders with single step recording. Finally, these days the studios are using personal computers with video cameras. The Amiga computers were popular, because of the good video capabilities. In the last few years, the IBM compatible PC computers are preferred.
The Firka software is a system-independent project. This means it is not limited to one hardware or operating system. It made specially for cartoon professionals, to create the linetest easy and fast. We test the software in our cartoon productions under real conditions. The author learned in an art school and he worked also as animator, line-test operator and compositor.
| The working of the software seems similar to the painting and rendering softwares, but the goal is very different: the line-tester must work as fast and comfortable as possible, but the painting system creates the best possible picture quality with very wide visual effect capabilities. Fortunately, today's computers are fast enough to finally combine these two requirements. Firka has some functions usually you can find only in painting systems, like camera movements, geometrical distortion, usage of masks and other effects, for example dissolve and blur. |  |
Here are some main features of the Firka software:
For professional purposes, you have to purchase a User Identification Code (UIC) from Firkafilm studio. After you entered the UIC into the program's "About" window, you can use all features and you can save and transfer the animation to other machines. The UIC is valid for all past and future versions of the software, for all supported operating systems. You can download the new versions of the software from us for free of charge.
An UIC can be installed on one software instance only. If you want to run Firka over a network, you must purchase and install as many UIC codes as many softwares you want to run simultanously.
We recommend you to try the restricted free version first. You can get it from the download page.
Professional line-tester UIC license
The full line-test version, including camera movements and mass file
operations. This version can work together with other UIC codes on a
shared scene database through a network.
Price of one Professional line-tester UIC: 1500,- Euros.
To order one or more UIC licenses, please send an order by fax with the following informations:
Our studio's fax number is: +36-76-505-323.
Our e-mail address to contact: firkanim@mail.datanet.hu
Answering to your request, we send back a formal invoice by fax. It contains our bank account parameters so the purchaser's bank can transfer the payment using Swift. You don't have to give us your bank account or credit card data. After we received the amount to our bank account (usually within a week), we send the UIC license by fax and together with the original invoice, by mail as well.