Moho Forum

I am animating to music I am composing. The music comes first, and then I build the animation. A lot of stuff needs to happen on beats in these movies. I've discovered that it's a PITA to make things happen right on beats when the bpm of the music isn't easily divisible by 24 fps. (Cycles, for examples, become out of sync fairly quickly when the music works out to 10.6 frames per beat.) So, moving forward I've decided that all my scoring will be done using bpm that is divisible by 24, so that I will always have an integer value for frames per beat.

If anyone is geeky enough to care, here is the formula I worked out. (Assuming animations at 24 fps)

fpb = frames per beat
bpm = beats per minute

bpm = 1440 / fpb
or
fpb = 1440 / bpm

for example, a piece at 130.909 bpm will mean my movie is 11 frames per beat.

So all I will need to do is select my bpm for my score and then adjust slightly so that the fpb is an integer. Gonna work good!

Now the question: I would love to be able to adjust the Moho timeline so that the vertical bars indicate beats (11 frames in this example) rather than seconds. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks for the info! I'm pasting the info in my 'tips and tricks' notebook. I'm sure this will come in handy someday.

Regarding the adjustable timeline guides, that's a good idea. I would suggest it to the developers.

For now, I use the timeline markers, which can be labeled, color coded, and copy/pasted multiple times. This isn't as convenient as just entering a value but maybe it will help if you need to do this now.

I've made a table for this purpose years ago, here it is: http://slowtiger.de/examples/fps_bpm.pdf

But don't stick to this too much. It's possible to animate to the beat of any tempo since you can add or skip a frame every nth beat. And you'll notice that certain visual actions have to be shifted one or two frames in either direction to appear to be on the beat.

Yeah, that's it. I've been adding or skipping frames like you said all along, but if you have cycles going, you can't do that. The video below is the last time I'll ever compose at a tempo that can't be divisible by 24 frames. You can see some cycles in there in the second half, or at least, potential cycles that I had to un-cycle and edit manually, much to the chagrin of the deadline.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLBo5ss ... e=youtu.be

A nifty trick is, when you edit in a video editor, to use its time stretch function on just one cycle. Depending on your rigs, this might be much faster than editing the cycle in Moho.

Is there any reason you couldn't use the waveform of the music, or a click track, as a visual reference?

That works to a point, but it assumes there are clear visual cues for the beats, which isn’t always the case. A click track in place of the actual score would fix that, but it still doesn’t help when using cycles, and there’s a lot going on in the score which inspires animation ideas, so I need to hear it. Since in this project the music is coming first, and I am writing it, the easiest is to write at the correct bpm in the first place.