/ Aswen News/Guangzhou, January 16, 2022 -- On January 14, 2022, Tencent announced that PAG(Portable Animated Graphics) is officially open source.
PAG is a complete set of animation workflow solutions independently developed by Tencent AVGenerator OTeam, which helps to easily and quickly apply Adobe After Effects animation to various platform terminals. It supports more AE features and a wider range of platforms (macOS, Windows, and Linux have been added) than the usual animated workflow solutions in the industry, and it has been deeply optimized for performance, with support for text and placehold-map editing and replacement, and can be closely integrated with video editing scenarios. At present, it has been widely used in dozens of apps inside and outside the company, including wechat, mobile QQ, King of Glory and other head apps.
1. Pain points addressed
Currently, the best animation design software is Adobe After Effects(AE for short). From AE animation production to terminal APP presentation, the traditional implementation method has three pain points, as shown in the figure above: high implementation cost, high communication cost and difficult to guarantee performance.
The flow chart of PAG is shown as the following figure. After the designers design the animation with AE, use the PAGExporter plug-in to export the PAG animation files. After the Exporter previews the results on the desktop, deploy the pag animation files online.
Compared with the traditional way of R&D and restoration,PAG scheme significantly improves the efficiency of launching animation materials: designers can directly output animation files upon completion of design, and R&D does not need to participate in code restoration, but only needs to access SDK once to achieve self-launching of materials, avoiding the time cost of repeated joint adjustment for effect confirmation. In addition, it can also mass-produce materials and stream them In the process, it directly replaces the traditional small workshop form, and greatly improves the efficiency of design and research and development with the industrial production mode.
2. Characteristic advantages of PAG
Small file size
Exporting the same AE animation content, the file decoding speed and compression rate are significantly ahead of the same type of schemes. Using the extensible binary file format, can single file integration includes pictures, audio and other arbitrary design resources.
Full AE feature support
In addition to supporting the pure vector export mode, it also introduces the hybrid export capability of BMP pre-synthesized combined vectors, which can support all AE features while maintaining the editable animation runtime.
Editable at run time
The ability to easily replace the content of text and placeholder maps at run time, while retaining the design's preset animation effects, can significantly reduce the development costs of similar photo and video templates. The editing features supported by PAG are not limited to the replacement of placeholder resources, but also support free composition at the layer level. It can make arbitrary addition, deletion, modification and displacement of the layer tree of each animation. It can also dynamically combine multiple atomic PAG special effects materials according to programming rules to synthesize a customized template at runtime, which can perfectly meet the needs of intelligent templates such as one-click film release and game battle report.
Convenient export plug-in
In view of the pain points of animation design by designers, the export plug-in has added a reminder function that does not support AE features, supports one-click setting of BMP pre-synthesis, setting of placeholder map filling mode, setting of PAG animation scaling mode, etc. In addition, the export plug-in has dozens of built-in automatic optimization material strategies, allowing designers to easily create animation material with excellent effect and performance.
Complete desktop preview tool
Effect preview
The desktop preview tool not only supports animation preview on the desktop, but also supports designers to locally fill materials and preview the fill effect in real time. It does not need to wait for the real effect to be confirmed after going online, avoiding the cost of a lot of rework.
Performance test
Performance detection enables designers to easily see the basic information of pag animation, as well as quantitative performance indicators, and quantitatively evaluate the performance of pag files, so that designers can make targeted optimization without having to wait until the launch to expose performance problems.
3. Application scenarios of PAG
In summary,PAG is mainly used in the following scenarios:
UI animation
Once the designer has designed the animation file, the development only needs to replace the preset text content, and the file size is very small.
Sticker animation
PAG animation files can be rendered in any subthread, can be synthesized into video images, used as stickers, subtitles, special effects, transition animations, and allows users to modify the text content on the premise of preserving animation effects.
Photo/video template
PAG allows you to replace built-in images as placeholders and retain all animation effects. Therefore, you can design the entire PAG animation as a template, replace the preset placeholder map with the user selected photo, and automatically apply the effect to generate video. The whole process allows designers to freely mass produce templates without the need for research and development intervention. Still based on the image replacement principle,PAG also supports replacing a placeholder map with a video to achieve the video template function.
Intelligent clip
Smart Clip generates customized templates based on video content uploaded by users. The templates are not fixed and are composed of multiple PAG files, similar to movable type printing. Designers can make use of this feature to build their own library of special effects components, and then connect with AI's recognition ability to combine according to certain rules to obtain an unlimited number of template effects, which can achieve one-click production. A typical example of this is King of Glory's Weekly Battle Report feature, which randomly generates videos of game highlight moments.
PAG is now officially open source. If you have any ideas or suggestions for improving PAG project, you can also search "libpag" on GitHub and visit the Github homepage of PAG to leave your views and suggestions for improvement.
