Moho Forum

Ok, so I'm about ready to begin animating my movie in earnest, having just recorded the voices.

What I'd like to know now is, is there a "proper" way to do the animation and editing? It seemed before, with AS 5.6 that I would have to either edit the soundtrack together first and bring it in to ASP and animate, or save each shot/cut as as separate project, due to the "one soundtrack per project" limitation. With version 6, seems like sky's the limit and I could do the whole movie in one project if I wanted to. I'm guessing I shouldn't because as I add bone layers it's going to start to slow down.

Thoughts?

I guess my plan is to figure out which audio take of a given line is perfect, make a sound file out of that, bring it into ASP, line up audio with animation, export a movie ("movie" here meaning a shot, or a whole scene, or whatever) to Final Cut, and manually resync with the audio in that program by ear ( I plan to assemble the movie in FCP).

Should I be exporting the highest/max settings for everything from ASP? Max colors, resolution, whatever else it offers?

Also, does anyone know what the project settings for FCP should be if I plan to do my movie in 1920x1080, at 24fps (these would be the specs of the exported QT movies from ASP).

Thanks.

With the new version you can segment your audio in to bits and import them all as separate audio layers. Using the sequencer you can then move each audio segment along the time line to assist you with your animating.

If I were doing this:

I'd put together the audio, plan out the shots/cut points. Go back to the audio and cut it to match what you want to do with the picture (so you'd end up with a bunch of audio files). Probably best to do this in "Soundtrack", set up the project to have a video framerate of 23.98 fps and a synchronization output framerate of 24 fps.

Now animate to each audio file. Plan in dissolves, etc. So, you end up with SC 1.aif and SC 1 Quicktimes-easy to just drop both on the timeline-they match up because you animated them together.

FCP: sequence>settings:

Frame Size: 1920x1080 Custom
Pixel Aspect: Square
Field Dominance: None
Editing Timebase: 23.98
Compressor: Animation
Quality: 100%

Audio settings to match whatever your audio is originally. Probably "Discrete Channels"

Also, I recommend you not export quicktimes from ASP. Output .png image sequences instead. I'd avoid animating the whole thing in one file. Better to deal with everything as separate, individual parts.

Incidentally, the 23.98 frame rate is because I assumed you're doing this to show on a TV. If that's not the case, you can go for 24 fps instead (which you would need to do if you were doing a filmout) That also assumes you're NOT PAL (in which case you should switch to 25 fps)