almost bought Anime studio... questions...

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 6:51 pm

hey there all!

I am highly considering purchasing anime studio, not pro yet...

i have used the moho demo and papagayo in the past. both of which seemed very cumbersome... i want to more or less do stuff in the vein of aqua teen hunger force, except more like improv sketches... heres some of what i did before....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eK1fJ-mNIc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-QIn_xn5sY

i will most likely be using xara to do the artwork, importing pngs, and somehow finding a "better" voice synch... anyone know of anything that works better than papagayo??? hopefully free... i will be using either trackaxpc or my bought copy of movie edit pro to string each scene together since i know there is a very small limit on the non pro ver... (for now)

either way, i really want to get into this big time and do my own youtube series.

i had been using a free cutout animation software for some of my music videos which you can watch on there, but id rather be using anime studio for everything.

so what im asking is- would it be better to do all of this mouth synch manually? how do you do it? how do they do it on tv? ....i appreciate it!

RonC

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:05 pm

You're not going to find better than Papagayo for free. I don't really understand your complaint about it. Mkelley uses it for a regular series. Granted it is time consuming, but if you want real lip-sync, you're not going to find a better solution.

Now if you are willing to sacrifice accuracy of phoneme shapes for ease and speed, AS has a great auto-lip-sync feature. Read up on it in the manual.

http://www.lostmarble.com/moho/manual/t ... index.html

One warning though, if you're determined to use images instead of drawing directly in AS, aside from having much long render times, you will be limited in what you can do. Granted, from your example it doesn't appear to be to ambitious. So you may not miss the flexibility of vectors.

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:12 pm

yeah i dont want anything complex, as i am a musician who writes impulsively. im about to check out the auto lipsynch. its not that papagayo is bad, its just really laggy when even using 3 min of dialogue. i guess i would have to separate things out.

about the vectors, i use xara and if you ever have used it, its the fastest vector software ever, and it would be cumbersome for me to try to import xara stuff in AS... ive tried it, trust me

but... i mean the length is limited to what, 1 min per scene? and i think you cant reload objects in- new scenes, am i right? thats not using pro.

hummm... just considering out loud - hope you all get what i want to do

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:14 pm

ps. anyone else using magpie or pamela? how does it work for you?

thanks

RonC

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:26 pm

Magpie and Pamela are basically just earlier incarnations of Papagayo. The Pamela developer apparently developed for PG.

AS Standard has a 3000 frame limit, so it depends on you frame rate on how long that is. At 12 FPS it's about 4 minutes.

And yes, AS Standard can import objects from other files.
File>Import>Anime Studio Object

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 8:21 pm

hmmmm well i will have to mull all of this over.

thanks for your input brother! anyone elses is greatly appreciated!

what is normal fps, 24?

RonC

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 8:47 pm

rpc9943 wrote:it would be cumbersome for me to try to import xara stuff in AS

I use Xara -- have done for a long time. And it's one of the cleaner exporters of .ai format vector artwork for AS. The main problem I have is with the software failing to recognise peak control points...

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 8:57 pm

For $20 (the current online price of AS Standard) I'm not even sure why you have to mull things over -- as someone else here said (and I may be misquoting) they spent more than $40 treating their kids to a meal at Burger King. You could buy two copies of AS for that <g>.

You really shouldn't do any one animated scene longer than 20 or 30 seconds -- look at movies or television and whether live action or animation you'll note this is true. Longer scenes are very tedious no matter what is happening on the screen (and in today's MTV generation, most scenes aren't longer than 10 seconds and some very much shorter). If you really like that Aqua teen series, for example, I am positive they don't have scenes longer than 10 seconds at a time. As you say, you'll be stitching stuff together so length in either Papagayo or AS is a non-issue.

PG isn't a good tool for extremely long lip sync passages due to the difficulty of moving the .WAV file around the timeline, but the sync stays "put" even in such longer scenes (it won't slip unless you don't know what you're doing). But, as noted above, you really shouldn't be doing these.

Spend the $20 -- if you made a mistake consider it a bad cheesburger <bg>.

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 11:49 pm

whoa uhmm its seemed i have been looking at the wrong websites and in the store it was 50 bucks... if indeed its $20 im getting it right away

thank you!!!

ps. where exactly does this go for $20 legit?

RonC

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 11:56 pm

Ron,

This still seems to be active:

Special offer

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:02 am

it shows $49.99 in the checkout. is there a discount coupon or something im missing???

sorry for being so incessant

im not too rich of a person

RonC

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:06 am

Looks like that deal is over. You'd think they'd just update the page instead of having old links still bringing up that deal page.

Odd.

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:21 am

uncool. :/

maybe ill just wait on all this.

RonC

El Samo · Post by **El Samo** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:35 am

Don't try to buy it, ask for the 30-day demo:
http://www.smithmicro.com/default.tpl?g ... =4&id2=223
...and then you can buy AS for $39.99.

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Sun Apr 12, 2009 1:55 am

Ron,

I'm sorry if I got your hopes up -- that link still seemed active (indeed, there doesn't appear to be any sort of date on that offer, which isn't very nice of SM). So it appears the cheapest you can get AS is $40 (still a steal for the greatest piece of software I've ever owned).

But don't apologize about not having enough money -- while it sounds like you are young (and when I was young I probably had much much less than you have) no one ever has enough money, I don't care if they are Donald Trump. And in these tough times we all need to watch our pennies (I'm on a fixed retirement income and this lesson is very clear to me). About the only thing I can tell you is that while I have spent tens of thousands of dollars (I'm not kidding) on software (most of it on graphics software) I've never had a problem I loved as much as AS. It's all I really need nowadays, and my $$$ 3D and other graphics programs are not even installed on my newest computers because of it. It's cheap at twice the price.