Sony Movie Studio?

[braj]

I'm trying to use Sony Movie Studio 12 (basically Vegas Light) but the output video has 'trails' I tried to match the framerate, but Sony has 23.976 ITVC film as it's 24 FPS option. I am not sure if this is my issue at all, but if anyone has experience with SMS please let me know what settings work best.

[Greenlaw]

Vegas has an annoying feature called Smart Resample. You'll want to disable that. To disable it, you need to right-click on the clip, look in Switches and choose Disable Resample. I think this should get rid of the 'trails' you're seeing.

If you have several clips on the timeline, you can right-click the first clip and choose Select Events To End.

I don't know why Vegas does this by default--I don't think anybody actually likes what this does to footage, video or animated. Wish there was a way to disable it unless you actually want it on.

Also, be sure to select 24 fps (film) under your Project Properties. (The button is above the Preview window.)

I'm referring to Vegas 13 Pro but I think the above options are also available in Movie Studio. Hope this helps.

G.

[braj]

Thanks Greenlaw, but it still looks pretty bad when using the MP4 made from Windows ASP 11. I did however try exporting to PNG sequence, that looks so much better, the colors are true to the original, the MP4 I was using is washed out, I guess the lesson learned is that MP4 is good for quick renders that keep whatever inline audio in place, then when I want to finish I need to render to PNG and work with that. My question now is, will there be any issue between the 24 FPS exported from ASP and the PNG sequence when it comes to syncing audio up in the video editor? I do have it set to 23.976 Film, and so far it all looks like it is working fine. I don't have dialog right now though, so if there are sync issues I am not seeing it with my snippet of finished intro sountrack (which isn't really finished anyhow).

[drumlug13]

In Movie Studio, If you go to your "Project Properties" you can manually type in a 24 frame rate.

To save time I went ahead and set up and saved templates that match Anime Studio settings

[Greenlaw]

Last spring, Alisa and I did a 1 minute animated short that served as the title sequence for a feature film. Sadly, we can't show the animation publicly yet but I brought it up to talk about our editorial workflow on the project. Our workflow varies slightly from project to project depending on the visual style and final delivery requirements but the following notes may give you a few ideas to try:

1. First, establish the final format. This particular job was rendered at 1080p and 24fps. Normally, we like to render our own projects at 720p because it's just a lot easier to work with but since this short was going to be attached to a live action film from another production company, 1080p it was.

2. From Anime Studio Pro, we like to render out multiple passes and masks for compositing and effects, so we always render to PNG with embedded alpha channels. We make heavy use of ASP's Layer Comp system. ASP's Layer Comp system is similar to the system in Photoshop and it's a whole lot easier than breaking out individual comp scenes manually, especially in ASP 11, where you can batch render all the Layer Comps in your file with a single click. If you use a compositing program like Fusion or After Effects, using this feature is highly recommended.

For our most basic scenes, we render sky, background, characters and foreground passes, and more advanced uses will includes control masks for effects. This project had as many as 8 masks per scene. (For some of our 3D animated productions, we may output a dozen or more layers and masks.)

By the way, Fusion is free right now for non-commercial use. These days, I seem to be using After Effects a lot but I used Fusion for 12 years when I was a staff artist/animator with Rhythm & Hues. After R&H, I used Fusion for several freelance jobs and I still use it for personal work--Scareplane, for example, was entirely composited in Fusion. I highly recommend it.

3. The rendered PNG layers are brought into After Effects for compositing and effects (like motion blur, glows, DOF, color correction, etc.) It really doesn't matter which compositing program you use--each program has unique strengths, but they all use layers and masks for source material. But if you don't need compositing, you can go directly to your editor.

Anyway, from AE, we write out .avi files using the free Lagarith codec. Lagarith is a good lossless format ideal for archival files. It's a compressed format but because it's lossless, the quality is nearly indistinguishable from uncompressed. (And certainly much better quality than rendering to .mp4.)The downside is that it's very processor intensive, so it's not very good for realtime playback. More on how to work around that that in the next section.

4. Since Lagarith is not so great for realtime playback, we need to transcode it to something more friendly for editorial use. In our last two projects we use Virtual Dub and set up a script for scaling the clips to half size and converting it to Divx .avi. Then we set up a batch Wizard setting that takes the Lagarith clips and saves them to a 'Proxy' directory. One the presets have been made, you simply run the batch render and in a few seconds, you'll have fully playable proxy files for editing. How fast is this process? Well our last production had 22 scenes, some of which were several hundreds of frames long--Virtual Dub can transcode the entire 1080 production in just a couple of minutes.

(Note: you can render directly to Lagarith .avi from ASP is you don't need to break out scenes for compositing. For that matter, I think ASP 11 will allow you set up batch presets for different, so you can probably render your master file and proxy file directly from ASP with just a couple of mouse clicks.)

This is important: be sure your master files and proxy files have identical names, and they should both be .avi. More on the reason why in the next section.

5. For organizational reasons, we have a footage folder that contains three folders: Master, Proxy and Edit. We render the Lagarith master clips to a Master folder, and the Divx proxies to the Proxy folder (surprise!) The Edit folder is what our editorial program uses as it's source footage. You can call the folders whatever you want but this works well for us.

Initially, the Edit folder contains copies of everything that's in the Proxy folder. Because the files are very small, they play back very quickly in a program like Vegas, even if you're altering the files with fx or other plugins in the program. Even though the Proxy files are half-size, Vegas will automatically scale it up the the target size--in this case, from 540p to 1080p. (Note: We're using Vegas here but I think this should work with Movie Studio too--from what I recall, the programs are nearly identical.)

After the editing is done and I'm ready to render finals formats, I copy the files from the Master directory to the Edit directory, and overwrite the proxies in there. (THis is why the files need to be identically named.) When you open the project in Vegas, it will automatically replace the low-res proxies with the hi-res masters, and render the edit using the highest quality data. (Alternatively, you can just rename the Master or Proxy folder to Edit--that may be quicker if you have a slow network, and Vegas doesn't really care since it's just looking files in a folder called Edit.)

It's worth pointing out that Vegas can generate it's own proxy files of items already on the timeline. This works well for live action video footage that isn't going to change but it's a bit of a pain for animation that my need to go through multiple revisions because you need to delete the proxies and re-render every changed file. This isn't technically different from what I do with Virtual Dub but I find it's faster and easier to keep track of things when writing specially formatted files to discreet directories. Whichever method you choose is up to you--I would try both and see which works best for you.

6. Finally, I after final color corrections and audio tweaks, we output to whatever format we need. On our last job, we rendered Sony AVC with Computer RGB to Studio RGB Levels adjustment for Vimeo compatible files. You absolutely need to do this for Vimeo or YouTube videos, otherwise the footage will look washed out after uploading. The vimeo version was for online client previews--we like to use Vimeo to get quick client approvals and also because it allows us to secure the file using private links and password protection. Then we render out an Avid DNxHD .mov for the client's editorial system and put this in a Dropbox for them. We also rendered a MainConcept .mp4 for realtime playback on portable devices like iPad, Android and Windows tablets. This is handy to show friends, colleagues and impromptu presentations when reeling in the next paying gig. Finally, we render a Lagarith version for archival purposes.

It's true that Uncompressed is often recommended for archival but we chose Lagarith files because the are much smaller with no loss in quality. (If anybody can recommend other good lossless archival formats, please let me know. Years ago we used to use Huff YUV and we switched to Lagarith for x64 compatibility and additional features. That's worked out for us for a few years now but we're always looking out for better ways to do things.)

As for audio syncing, here's what we do:

First we create an animatic in Vegas (or your edit program of choice), with all our audio and music, edited as close to final as we can at this stage. An animatic is basically a version of your movie with the storyboard cut in. You can have some limited animation here too but don't go crazy--save the effort for final animation.

Next, I mark all the edit points. Once the markers are set, I batch render the entire edit to individual 'reference' clips. These files can be loaded into your animation program as 'background' clips to animate to. Alternatively, you can batch render only audio files and load these in to animate to. So long as your animation program and editorial program use the same format settings, the output from the animation program will stay in sync.

Finally, after you write out each animation file, simply over-cut the imported 'finals' on a 'final animation' layer above your 'animatic' layer. Everything should be in sync but after you get the final footage in, you'll probably want to make final adjustments to the audio. Because of this, you may want to keep all your audio clips (dialog, music, sfx) unflattened so you can slip and tweak the individual clips as needed.

Sorry, I know that was a long post. I probably missed still a few things I meant to talk about so feel free to ask any questions.

Bear in mind that the above workflow is just what we did on our last production, and not everything mentioned here may be relevant to your project. In fact, since we frequently change our visual style, we're constantly re-evaluating our workflow from project to project. But I hope the example above gives you a few ideas for minimizing technical issues and getting the best possible output quality. We try to keep the technical parts of our work foolproof because computer animation is hard enough just drawing and animating stuff. Once a solid workflow established, we don't have to think about it so much and we're almost free to focus on just the fun parts of the job.

Hope this helps.

G.

[braj]

Thanks for the extensive reply Much of that is overkill for me but I'm sure very helpful to many reading this. I'll just be using ASP 11 and Movie Studio, the effects and editing capabilities of that setup are enough for me by a big margin and I want to keep this simple. I'm just making little films with my kid. The bits about not flattening the audio file into one file and using layer comps in ASP are very helpful. I was lamenting the mp4 output from Windows MP4 in ASP not having transparencies but using PNG sequences is way easier than I imagined, so by by MP4.

So, just to verify once and for all, is the 23.976 the same or different from ASP's '24 frames' ? I can definitely change the frame rate in Movie Studio to 24, (or ASP to 23.976), but since that isn't the default for any of the presets, and the presets listing 24p give a framerate of 23.976, I am a bit confused which I should use. Will there be any playback compatability issues with any particular framerates?

[Greenlaw]

This is my understanding:

If you're final destination is internet streaming (Vimeo, YouTube, etc.,) or otherwise playing on a computer screen, ideally you want to set your frame rate to 24 fps or 30 fps across the board, that is, for animation, compositing and editing. This is because whole frames are easier to work with and keep in sync.

23.97 fps is more important if your footage needs to be cut or composited with live action video that was recorded at 23.97 fps. Naturally if the live action was shot at 24, 29.97 or 30, you should be rendering your animation at those rates.

Depending on the country you're in and its local broadcast standards, frame rate can become a much bigger issue. My suggestion is to play it safe and do everything in 24 fps as the final output can be converted to whatever is needed for broadcast. Animation is traditionally done at 24 fps and it's still a widely accepted. I've done some work at 30 fps, which can look smoother and crisper but a while back I decided to stick with 24 fps (for our own work) because it's far fewer frames to render and leaves us time to do other things. (Like hang out with friends and enjoy our family.)

If your concern is audio syncing, again, it's best to pick one framerate and keep it consistent throughout the process. If it's all the same, you have nothing to worry about.

Now, in your case, if your project in Movie Studio is set to 23.97 but your imported animation is set to 24fps, yes, there will be some drift along the way. It really depends on how long your scenes are. If they're only a few seconds each, the drift really won't be noticeable but you may find your self trimming a frame or two from the clips. (I usually render a few extra frames at the head and tail as handles so I can slip the clip forward or backward when I need to. It may only be perceptual but sometimes you can improve the sync this way, even if you did animate to the audio at the same frame rate.

If it's not too late, I would just change the frame rate of your project to 24 fps. You will probably need to adjust the position your audio clips but it will be worth it. Once set to 24fps, you can export scene clips and audio clips to use as reference in Anime Studio and it will be in perfect sync going in either direction. (Assuming you Anime Studio project is also set to 24 fps.)

BTW, there are many advantages to rendering out sequential frames (like PNG) as your initial output format over a single video file. For example, if you have a few bad frames or maybe you want to change the animation or lip sync in only a few frames in a very long scene, by rendering to frames you only need to re-render the little bits and pieces that you have changed in the animation. But if render to a single video format, you're going to have to re-render the entire animation from frame 1. For this reason, in a real-world production environment, it's extremely rare to render to a video format straight out of your animation program. If you have many scenes or very long scenes that may take a long time to render, you really don't want to waste a lot of time (and money!) unnecessarily re-rendering perfectly good data.

For example, at my day job, we typically render directly to Avid DNxHD .mov for our editorial department, but if I have an especially gnarly comp that takes a few hours to render, then I'll render to sequential frames first--this way, I don't lose hours of time just to re-render the whole thing when I only needed a few frames. Or, lets says the scene is prone to crashing because it's so complicated. If it crashes while I'm rendering the comp, I can always pick up the render from where it left off when it crashed--if you're rendering to a video format, chances are good that if the program crashes, you've lost the entire render and will need to start over from frame 1 again.

Once the frames are completely rendered and looking good, I can load these frames into another comp render the final video file to the .mov file without worry. Because CPU intensive work is done, rendering to video file at this point is very fast and not likely not to crash at all.

Just a few things to think about. And you should think about it...working efficiently isn't just for big-scale productions. If Alisa and I didn't apply the same habits from our day jobs to our personal projects, our personal work would never get done. (And we would have less time for family and friends too.)

Feel free to ask any questions and good luck with your project!

G.

[braj]

Thanks Greenlaw, that settles it, 24 FPS across the board PNG is much nicer to work with, I figured out Layer Comps in ASP last night, it is super easy, though I don't see a way to render all layer comps in one batch, which is OK I guess. Previously I thought I was stuck without a way to render transparencies in video for overlays, which was a bummer, I resorted to doing greenscreen stuff, but PNGs totally solve that, now I'm rendering to MP4 just for quick tests and working with my audio DAW (Presonus Studio One). I think I'm set now. All my tools are happily working together. Thanks for the help!