dance, is it possible? (with music)

[the switch]

first I'd like to say hello all, I'm new to the world of cutout or bone animation and found out about moho from a forum link on google and I just love your application (still learning though )

I got into the cutout animation because I wanted to learn how to do dance films with animation (synced to music of course) and I noticed you can sync animation to music in flash but that was at school, I don't own flash

soooo

1) I have been scanning the forums on sound and have been playing around with it, is there a fairly easy way to sync the animation to the music AS I'm animating it and then make the finished video with the same synced result? avi etc is fine but I'd love to be able to do it in flash .swf so I can streem it

2) if this isn't possible do any of you know where I should look for such a program that has cutout animation or the moho skeletal character animation wich can be synced to sound/music, (I'v tried toonboom v3 but its hard to synce motions with the sound waves, its hard to explain) thanks

oh and I really do love this program, its quite amazing to me and the fact that I havent heard of moho before is strange too, this way of animation is just . . . .

Crazily Awsomely Cool

hehehe, yes the devs need some love once and awile

[Rasheed]

First of all, welcome to this forum! I hope you will find it useful and keep visiting it for help and perhaps help others if you can.

Now to your questions:

1) In my experience if you export sound and animation in Shockwave Flash format, in a network environment (internet), the animation and the sound go quickly out of sync. The only way to prevent this is by using a preloader. Moho doesn't export a preloader, so you need to do that in another program (typically Adobe/Macromedia Flash, but there may be thirdparty programs out there that enable you to do the same).

So Shockwave Flash (.swf) exported from Moho is fine for local viewing, but not for online viewing.

And BTW if you want to stream animation, you'll need a dedicated server, both for Shockwave and for movie formats. If you can afford this, you surely can afford buying the Flash program.

But there is a workaround, at least, if your animation isn't larger than 100 MB and 10 minutes and only in theory (I haven't tried this yet). You can upload your animation to YouTube (you have to be registered to YouTube to be able to do that). YouTube converts your avi animation into a Shockwave Flash movie (a pixel format, not the vector format). I'm sure there are programs out there to grab Shockwave Flash files from a server and download it to your computer. After that, you upload the file to whatever server you like, provided the Shockwave Flash file on YouTube is playable from a normal webserver.

You can, of course, decide that YouTube is good enough as a server solution and redirect your viewers to the YouTube website.

2) I faintly remember some programs that export to Flash or Flash Video, which use bone animation, but I have forgotten their names, but not their price range, several thousands of dollars. That is far beyond my budget. And none of these programs were as easy to use as Moho.

I hope this helps.

[slowtiger]

Hi switch,

short answer: yes, it's possible to do dance animation in sync with the music in Moho.

Long answer: In order to achieve the desired result, one has to take care of some details. Some things to consider are:

1. Output format. Anything video is quite OK, it will work nearly automatically. A streaming format like .swf is a bit tricky, sometimes you need additional programming or other measurements to ensure synchronuous playback everywhere.

2. Breakdown of the music. I'm the type of animator who tries to plan in advance, so when I do animation for music I make sure the music itself has a tempo I can easily animate to (120 bpm, 144 bpm (depending on frame rate) etc), which is easy since I compose my own music. If you have to animate to an existing piece, you need a breakdown of the beats, as exactly as it must be in sync. You coud either work in frames or in SMPTE times (which is what I do when I compose music to an existing animation).

3. Hardware. Don't ever rely on an animation which seems to work perfectly with the music within your production ebvirement! Playback of animation as well as sound can be affected by many restrictions, no matter how much "real time playback" the developers of your program promise. At least you should check synchronicity by rendering test videos as early as possible. Even then you might be tricked, as I found out the hard way just recently. I had to add the soundtrack to the video in a video editing software because the soundtrack rendered from the animation program was heavily out of sync.

[the switch]

hmmm thankyou

I'm not that aware of how streeming media workes on the web, I have a lycos site (free webspace with ads) but thanks for the heads up, anyhow I'm happy with just avi or quicktime, than I throw it on a cd .

and as regards to getting the beats in sync (think trance music hehehe) it seems quite clear where the beats show up in the timeline, well see though as I play around

oh and perhaps off topic I'm using a music creation software called ejay 6 I belive, yes there are tones of pre-made sounds that come with it BUT you can record your own samples/sounds etc wich I'm probibly going to do when I get my old piano keyboard hooked up

[AlanPS]

slowtiger,

I am working on my first animation project and I was wondering if there is some formula for fps vs. bmp. I'm doing some jazz music with weird time signatures and some boogie woogie music.

Also, can you explain the animating on 2s or whatever the concept is for making sure music and fps sync correctly?

Thanks