How do you accurately Lip-sync when it's dropping frames?

[Undiscovered]

OK thanks to all on this forum especially Victor and Mtbuck24 I learned how to lip sync with smart bones.

The only problem is when I go to animate the lip-sync, I am only getting 10fps out of 24.

I tried shutting off background layers to get more frames but the highest I can get is 12-13fps.

Lip-sync is very hard to make believable as it is.. and is almost impossible to guess where to put keyframes when the timeline is skipping frames.

Also I really wish the new Preview Animation (Anime Studio pro 10 new feature) would show all 24fps with audio.
Apparently it previews 24fps without audio. Why? lol

How do you guys do it?

How do I gain more frames per sec?

Any help is appreciated?

[heyvern]

For me I simply scrub the time line to check specific areas for lip sync. Scrubbing gives me enough feedback and doesn't skip frames. Skip frames only happens during playback and not scrubbing. When scrubbing you see all the frames and hear the audio.

I also use the wave form to see where to sync. After I do large sections of lip sync I play back to see roughly how it's going. If I need more I do a low quality render so it doesn't take too long and I can see the actual full frame lip sync.

You can turn off "Skip Frames" to see all the frames, however this will probably cause the audio to playback in "slow motion" but it will show all the frames.

[slowtiger]

I never rely on project playback when doing lip sync. Instead I render out that part and watch in movie player.

Creating lip sync is easy. One hand on the arrow keys, I go forward one or two frames and create a switch key with the other hand. I can hear enough of the audio to know which phonem I need. This is just a matter of practive.

[jahnocli]

...plus you could use Papagayo. Takes a little getting used to, but it's pretty good at what it does, and it provides you with an editable phoneme list for AS. And the price is right.

[Undiscovered]

Thanks all for your responses.

Special thanks to Vern about turning Allow frame skipping off.
It took me a minute to find this option. (For beginners.. it is located in the animation top menu)

When you deselect the Allow Frame skipping option sometimes it will effect the audio speed and sound but it will still give you 24fps.

I kinda like how the audio goes into a slow monster voice. It slows down the animation making it easier to lipsync in my opinion. lol

ALSO!!!!
I found out what is making my frames drop though.
I have a text layer with about 10 letters that I converted that text into vector's.
(Right click the text layers and select convert to vector.)

Try doing that, It creates a billion points on your text. lol
When I shut this vector text layer off, My frames went from 13fps to 22fps.


BTW, thanks for the responses about switch layers and papagayo, but I can't use those when I am using the smart bones way to create lip-sync. Check this video to see the way I do it, From Mtbuck24..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlyz5KlR-OQ

Thanks all again,

[Greenlaw]

That's a nice setup but I think it's too involved for our schedule requirements. That's strictly a personal opinion of course.

FWIW, I prefer to use Switch Layers because I find it faster to keyframe a phoneme and move on. If I need to vary a mouthshape for a specific expression, ASP makes easy enough to tweak a shape on the fly. BTW, if your desire is to avoid 'snappy' mouth shapes, Switch Layers has an option to morph shapes between layers for smooth shape transitions.

I typically like to use a program called Magpie Pro to do my lip sync. I mainly use it for 3D but in the case of the Brudders 3D films, I used Magpie to output hand-drawn shapes as frame sequences, which were then texture mapped to proxies of the characters in 3D and composited in post. This method was generally a stylistic decision to keep the 3D looking somewhat like the comic strip and, more importantly, by outputting the mouths as a separate element, I had to flexibility to change or fix the lip sync without re-rendering the cgi. You can see how this was applied in 'Happy Box' and the 'Pooper' excerpt. To keep this on-topic, Magpie Pro can output data specifically for Anime Studio, as well as 3D data and 2D frames. It's actually quite similar to Papagayo but with more features. (Note: I personally have not used Magpie with ASP yet.)

For our Anime Studio short film 'Scareplane', I intentionally kept lip sync to a minimum because we were more interested in learning how to use Anime Studio and wanted to keep the project fairly 'simple'. But the two little bits of lip sync we have at the end were hand keyed using Switch layers and it went very quickly--I don't think I spent more than a few minutes for both characters. If you have the phonemes properly set up in your switch layers, the process is actually very easy even without additional tools.

(Note: In the case of 'Scareplane', I did not use the smooth transitions option for the Switch Layers lip sync. I really do like the 'snappy' mouth motion and I wanted to keep the animation somewhat consistent with our other films.)

Hope this info is helpful.

G.

[Greenlaw]

BTW, thanks for the tip regarding how you solved the dropped frames issue. I haven't run into that one yet so I was a little puzzled about why you were getting dropped frames. Now I'll know what to do when I run into this problem.

G.

[sbtamu]

I prefer using Papagayo over smart bones when lip syncing if I am using switch layers.