Moho Forum

Just got this up in time for the holidays-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xrmUpIp ... annel_page

It's even in HD (but the interlacing still gave me troubles)-

All comments and critiques appreciated-

Cool.

Your animations always bring a smile to my face. Original, nicely drawn, nice flow. I have your Youtube page bookmarked. I am looking forward to more animations from you. The political ones are a nice touch.

BTW, how do you use Anime in your animations?

Meaning, do you draw all your characters and backgrounds in Anime, and set up all the animation via switch layers and the timeline?

For example on our "Tater" animation we drew the character and the backgrounds in Anime (one Anime file) and used switch layers in that file to switch between the "shots" (or scenes whatever you want to call it). We used one wav file for the soundtrack which we brought into Anime and animated to it.

Or do you use another program for most of the animation?

I'm curious to know how you export out of Anime. We export the entire animation (including soundtrack) as a mov file using Sorenson 3 compression (I know, 'tis bad but it works for us). Then we convert it to dv-avi and import into Windows Movie Maker to add music and titles. The final export is a wmv format (640x480).

You stated you did this animation in HD. How did you do that?

I wish more people on this forum would speak about about the technicalities of how they animate using Anime, but I guess it is a "trade secret" or something.

http://www.youtube.com/areyouguystwins

Sorry it took so long to reply, I was trying to get this one done-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6oUXu4A ... annel_page

The settings I'm using (adobe premiere) are-

Export to Adobe Media Encoder
NTSC
23.976 fps
HDTV 1280px X 720px
H.264 format

set:

VBR, 2 Pass
Target Bitrate [Mbps]: 6
Maximum Bitrate [Mbps]: 10

The key is using the "H.264" format and the size of 1280px X 720px-

I do all of my animation in AS with the exception of backgrounds (files get too heavy) I generally do backgrounds in Illustrator or Photoshop and bring them into AS as PNG's-

I set the heads up for my models using flip switches (hair, mouth and jaw all going off of the main DAT file) I have them interpolating which makes it a bit more time consuming when building them-(each layer has to have the same exact amount of verticies)-

I export everything out uncompressed and edit in adobe premiere- I'm pretty sure the fix for my interlacing issues is to export from AS as an image sequence (read that in one of the threads here) but have yet to try it-

Eventually I'm going to post how I set up my characters in the "tips" forums but my technique keeps evolving even though it's not as advanced as a lot of the things that have been posted, (I feel guilty for having not done so already because everything I know about animating I learned here)-

Thanks for the compliments and sorry (again) for taking so long to respond-

LOL, that's was hilarious! I like the second one too.

Thanks for replying sinclair. I have this paranoid streak where I believe most of my posts and animations go into the black hole of nothingness -- that or they are being read and viewed by aliens on Jupiter (a subject for another animation to be ignored on Youtube ).

I cut and paste your technical specs into a text file so I can have it for future reference. I see that you, like most people on this forum, export your animations as uncompressed (avi or mov). I also see that you are going to test exporting your animations as image sequences (pngs I assume) and compiling them in your movie editing program Adobe Premiere?

Let me know how that goes for you, as I am curious if you find it easier or more time consuming. In between our "Attic Dweller" series, and "The Floop and Bump" series (almost done with the first episode of that one) we are currently animating another feature length film called "Ham Bone" a screenplay we wrote a couple years ago. There is no way we could export as image sequences for our feature length film -- way too many pngs to keep track of.

But I am sure *that* is the best and proper way to go per this forum. I am always curious to see how others use Anime. We are still using Anime 5.5. I wish the layer ordering option in 5.6 was available under switch layers but it isn't so we have decided to stick with 5.5 for now because we place all of our layers under one main switch layer.

Again, probably not the "right" way to do it, but it works for us for the crap we are outputting.

Anyway, I really enjoy your animations, the best on this board that I have seen so far. But then again I am a stickler for 2d animation with original/colorful drawings and a good/sharp/witty storyline. Keep up the good work, with some good luck you could hit it big in the underground animation scene (wait -- is there an underground animation scene? If only...).

Thanks J-

Twins-

Check this out- (the final part of our Christmas Carols)

(make sure to hit "watch in HD)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPhEShly ... annel_page


I exported as PNGS-

When I brought them into Premiere I simply selected the first one and checked a box that let the program know that I was importing an image sequence (each frame is numbered by AS)- I cut it just like film- as far as space; I believe it took up less than uncompressed AVI would have-

This is by far the best quality I've gotten online so far-(it was always depressing spending all that time animating only to have the quality completely bottom out once it was uploaded)

S

Excellent as always! You're one of the animators on here who I study frame by frame to try and learn from.

Great work Sinclair! Very good video quality.

Twins,
Layer sorting doesn't work on immediate sub-layers of a switch layer (since you can only see one of these at a time it doesn't really matter though), but you can do layer sorting within group (or bone) layers that are sub-layers of a switch layer.

synthsin75:

I tried to do some layer ordering in Anime 5.6 and it did not work under a main switch layer. Here is my sample layout:

-andy's grinder (main switch layer)
--andy (group layer)
----andy front (group layer)
------andy front bones (bone layer)
--------left arm (vector layer)
--------left hand (vector layer)
--------right arm (vector layer)
--------right hand (vector layer)

When the switch for the "andy" layer is set on the timeline for it to be visible (say at frame 100). I then place a keyframe on the "Layer Ordering" line on the timeline in the "andy front bones" layer at frame 100.

At frame 101, I move the right arm and right hand vector layers above the left arm and left hand vector layers. It makes a key frame automatically at frame 101 on the "Layer Ordering" line on the timeline in the "andy front bones" layer.

However, the layers do not jump like they should when I move from frame 100 to 101. At frame 100 I should see the left arm and left hand above the right arm and right hand. But instead I see the right arm and right hand above the left arm and left hand. The right arm and right hand should move above the left arm and left hand at frame 101 not 100.

When I move the "andy" group layer outside the main "andy's grinder" switch layer the layer ordering key frames work correctly.

So it seems they do not work under a main switch layer even if the group layer is visible (switched on).

That's my experience using layer ordering. I suppose we could stop using main switch layers for our "shots" and instead turn group layers off and on between shots. That should solve the problem. My next short animation I will use 5.6 and see how it goes, I know the texture fill has changed also.

Sinclair:

I watched your latest Christmas animation. That's insane in the membrane! You are right about the quality being a thousand times better in HD. Maybe someday when I hit the lottery (hey, I can always dream) I will look into getting Adobe Premiere (works on Windows Vista?) so I can make some decent looking animations for Youtube.

Someday...

Oh right, I forgot that it makes keyframes as if it were working but doesn't.

Hopefully that's high on the list of bug fixes.

Wow, thanks again for the compliments, I was kinda thinking the same thing twins was, post something and watch it drop to the back pages (although with some of the content I've posted I can understand)-

I'm really liking this HD feature on youtube, I re-upped "FAQ" on my main page and "My 401"

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=eO_xVelxy ... annel_page

The compression had been so horrible on the original 401 that it really made me think twice about uploading anything else to youtube-

Twins- What are you using to edit? (if you don't mind me asking)- a lot of software supports image sequences and you can always find a compression program that supports H.264 (there are a lot of free-wares out there)-

There's always a work around it's just a matter of finding it-

S-

Sinclair:

Thanks for the info about how you export as HD for Youtube. I have been playing around with it and I have a test HD animation on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cwioaM40BE

I like the bigger screen, I don't know if the HD quality is that much better from watching our 4:3 animations in high quality. But at least it is larger, so that's cool.

I outlined below, the steps I took to get one of our animations into HD format for Youtube. Of course I had to export out of Anime uncompressed (ouch! 1 gig file for 10 seconds) to get the best format for HD (no brainer there). I don't know about doing our newest feature film in the HD format as we would have to get a Blue Ray burner to burn to a HD DVD, I guess time will tell.

Note: We animate on a Windows Vista (64 bit) computer.

Anyway, here are the steps for our 10 second HD file on Youtube:

Step 1: Animate using Anime 5.5 (with a wav soundtrack)
1280x720 format
24 fps
export as uncompressed avi (without the soundtrack)
(10 seconds of animation, 240 frames = 907,208 KB avi file)
-----------------------------------------------------------

Step 2:
Open Windows Media Encoder x64 Edition 9 Ver. 10
Convert the uncompressed avi to a wmv compressed file (no soundtrack)
Choose Destination High Quality Video (VBR Peak)
Settings:
- 24 fps
- 1280 x 720
- Avg Bit Rate: 5000 KBPS
- Peak Bit Rate: 10 MBPS
- Key Frame Rate every 4 seconds
- Deinterlace
- Codec Windows Media Video 9 Advanced
(converted file size = 3,037 KB)
--------------------------------------------------

Step 3: Import converted WMV file into Windows Movie Maker timeline (our editing program, we are too cheap to buy another one)
- Add Soundtrack (the wav file we animated to, usually the voices and some sound effects)
- Publish movie as a wmv file (now it has a soundtrack)
- file size is now 3,322 KB
(we notice re-exporting a wmv file from a wmv file does not seem to result in a loss in quality. Maybe we are not that picky.)
- Choose Windows Media HD 720p option when publishing movie -- supposedly this makes an HD movie

(I guess the new thing in HD is 1080i, Windows Movie Maker has that option -- well it is labelled as 1080p, but it doesn't seem to work too well)

Now we have a usuable, small, supposedly HD wmv file that we can bring in to Movie Maker and combine with other HD wmv files, add music and any additional sound effects and create an HD animated movie (in theory).
--------------------------------------------

Step 4:
- Import HD wmv files to Windows Movie Maker, add sound effects, transitions, credits etc. Publish movie by choosing Windows Media HD 720p option

------------------------------

That's it. Nothing like going around in circles to supposedly get a HD animation for Youtube. I didn't have to use the H.264 compression.

I have a headache now. Too much looking at the screen and noticing all the interlacing and artifact problems. Yuck. Maybe someday I will test the image sequence process. Although I don't think Windows Movie Maker imports them automatically.

It looks really great, sharp and clean-

I did notice a couple of "quirks" (but had to watch it a couple times to see em)-

I'm still on XP (vista scares me)- Thus my windows movie maker is now outdated (no HD settings)-

Even if it's not true HD (I don't believe mine are true HD either) the large size of the player makes it worthwhile-