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It can be helpful to have several different sets of image preprocessor settings, tailored to different regions of the image, or to different moving objects, or different sections of the overall shot. A PrepSet Manager permits this; it can be opened from the Shot menu, the shift-P accelerator, or a button at the lower left of the image preprocessor. A few options are also available in a drop-down list at the bottom-left of the image preprocessor dialog.
You can create a prepset by clicking the New Prepset item; you will be prompted for the name (which you can later change via Rename), description, and affected subsystem checkboxes. The new prepset is created with the current settings, your new prepset name appears and is selected in the prepset manager list, and any changes you make to the panel continue to update your new prepset. (This means that when you
are creating several prepsets in a row, create each prepset before modifying the controls for that prepset.)
WARNING: Be careful when creating prepsets that affect only some subsystems. While such a prepset may be listed as active, the actual image preprocessor settings—those settings not set by the active prepset—will be dependent on what prior prepsets you’d activated. Keep some prepsets that configure all the subsystems, and a few prepsets with limited impact, eg just to color settings. Use naming and descriptions to identify them and avoid confusion.
Once you have created several prepsets, you can switch among them using the prepset manager list: either double-click it or select it on the dropdown. All subsequent changes to the image preprocessor controls update the prepset active at that time.
If you want to play for a bit without affecting any of your existing prepsets, click Deactivate or switch to the No prepset setting on the dropdown, which disconnects you from all prepsets. If you then decide you want to keep the settings, create a new prepset.
To reset the image preprocessor controls (and any active prepset) back to the initial default conditions, which do nothing to the incoming image, select the Reset item from the prepset manager. When you are creating several prepsets, this can be handy, allowing you to start a new prepset from scratch if that is quicker.
Tip: It’s generally worthwhile to create an “Original” prepset with unchanged, default, shot settings. This can be done trivially before you start modifying image preprocessor settings, or later using the Reset operation.
You can delete the current prepset by selecting Delete. While this deletes the prepset, it does not affect the current image preprocessor settings. (No prepset becomes active after deleting one, unless you explicitly activate it.)
The PrepSet Manager lists the prepsets on a given shot; you can use the camera selector to choose which one is shown, independent of the main Active Tracker Host.
This facilitates copying prepsets to different shots within a scene file using the Copy and Paste buttons, which use their own private clipboard.
You can store your own set of standard prepset preferences using the controls on the PrepSet manager, by selecting which you’d like to save, then clicking Save as preferences. They are saved to a predefined prepset preferences file in your File/User Data Folder. Be aware that they contain not only static values, but any value animation that may be present as well. Animation usually isn’t a good idea when other shots may have different starting points and lengths.
When reading prepset preferences, they will be loaded only into the selected shot. Any existing prepsets with the same name will be updated; if they don’t exist they will be created. If you check “Update (only) all shots”, the prepset preferences will be loaded into all shots in the scene, with a crucial difference that only existing prepsets
will be updated—no new prepsets will be created. New and updated prepsets will be selected after the operation.
The PrepSet manager also permits you to save prepsets to, or read prepsets from, a “.prp” file of your choice with the same options as for preferences.
You may also use the File/Export/Plain Text/Image Preprocessor Preset as Script script to export either the current unnamed prepset, or all the named prepsets, as a Sizzle script. You can load the prepset(s) into a different scene using Scripts/Run Script on the exported .szl script. While the PrepSet manager’s export to file and import from file are generally simpler and more direct, the script can give you some more insight. The exported script is plain text and can be opened with any text editor (say Notepad or TextEdit), and contains only the non-default settings, so you can examine it to understand the prepsets (with reference to the Sizzle manual).
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