About to record audio and I need a little advice

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willwillwill
Posts: 63
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2016 11:13 am

About to record audio and I need a little advice

Post by willwillwill »

Hello
So I know all about papagayo, and I am using the mouth that comes with anime studio, the 3/4s mouth looks pretty good. I will record different actors soon and I am wondering about the best way to record them to interface with Moho. Should I have it all in one track, already mixed? And if I do that how do I make the different characters lip sync different parts? Do I use a switch layer to do that, and if I do how do I make that work? Do I put the mouths in one switch layer? Do I need to put all the characters in one big group layer?
OR
I guess the other choice is to record everything as separate tracks and frankenstein them together in Moho but I am guessing that will mess things up, no?
Thanks so much, I am learning slowly and it wouldn't be possible if it weren't for this forum.
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slowtiger
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Re: About to record audio and I need a little advice

Post by slowtiger »

A good way to record would be:
- record each voice separately
- edit and mix so you have a correct timing of the dialogue
- render each voice separately out from the mix to get clean voice tracks for Papagayo
- each character gets its own mouth set.

You never put 2 characters into the same switch layer for lip sync.
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Greenlaw
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Re: About to record audio and I need a little advice

Post by Greenlaw »

I don't use Papagayo but here are some tips that may be useful:

Before I do any animation, I prepare an animatic. The animatic's editorial project should have separate dialog, SFX and music tracks, even if they're temporary. (FYI, temporary audio is called a scratch track.) For my personal projects, I do this in Vegas Pro but any video editor will do. After the animatic it completed, I mark the cut points for every scene, and export each scene's audio to its own audio clip file. This way I have the correct timing with the track for the whole scene, and I don't have to worry about setting audio offsets in Moho (or for any animation program.) Just import and start animating.

Normally, I don't bother separating the dialog track from the SFX and music. However, for lipsync, it may become necessary to separate the audio tracks if it's hard to make out the speech, especially if characters are talking over each other or if the SFX and music is loud. If you're using any kind of auto-lipsyncing tools, you definitely want only one character's dialog per audio clip, without all the other sounds.

To do this, in the animatic project, I make sure the dialog is placed on one or two dialog tracks and grouped as 'Dialog'. This way, the tracks can be solo-ed and exported by themselves without other audio. Just like in the above above description, I prefer to export each scene's dialog audio clip separately to preserve the scene timing.

For manual lip-sync animation, it might not be so necessary to get a clean dialog track but use your judgement.

In some studio productions I've worked on, I might get a track that has other sounds mixed in. This might be done just for expediency and I can usually work with that just fine. It's better to get the clean track though, and if it becomes a problem, the editor can usually provide a clean dialog track.

When exporting the audio, save it in an uncompressed format and at the frame rate you intend to animate to. Otherwise, you might not be able to scrub the audio with frame accuracy, and if the frame rate is different, it will probably drift over time. Some high-quality compressed formats might be okay, but I default to uncompressed just to be safe. Feel free to experiment with different formats though and post what you learn.

As for how to prepare audio for Moho, that depends on how you intend to use it. Normally, I bring audio from the animatic with all the sounds, and I may separate the dialog track if I think I need to hear it more clearly for lipsync. This audio is all just for reference though as I don't normally export movie files from Moho with sound. But if I did, I'd want to get the highest quality audio files.

Normally, I export PNG files from Moho for compositing, and then export a movie file from my compositor for my editorial program. But even if I am exporting a movie file directly from Moho, I do not include the audio. When the movie is imported to the editorial program, the audio is already prepared there, and I just overcut the final scences over the animatic scenes. If the frame rate for sound and animation has been maintained throughout the process, everything should line up perfectly.

Hope this helps.
willwillwill
Posts: 63
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2016 11:13 am

Re: About to record audio and I need a little advice

Post by willwillwill »

Wow, incredibly helpful but a lot to get my head around. I expect to be reading this many times in the coming weeks. I hope it's Ok I may have some follow up questions soon. Thanks so much meanwhile, the people on this forum are amazing
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