Have anyone tryed synfig?

[slowtiger]

if it wants to be considered a program that will be used by the majority then it needs to address lip sync

No argument about that.

And I'm not sure what commercial animation you are talking about, but here most lip sync animation is FAR more than 50% of screen time (about 95%, quite easily)

OK, USA TV programming is nothing I'm very familiar with. I'm talking from a european POV. In my understanding any animation with more than 50% lipsync screen time is cheap animation, if not plain bad. There's nothing wrong with neither doing nor watching it. It's just not something you could really call "quality animation".

[Genete]

mkelley,
it is curious how things are happen around Synfig. I've just send a patch to support reading Papagayo voice files into Synfig.

See this link. the patch has been not so difficult to prepare because Synfig currently has the ability of reading a image sequence from a text file. So just interpreting the Papagayo output file into the internal Synfig format the phonemes sequence is loaded as a image sequence. It is not spectacular but allow lipsync almost.

I agree that lipsync is absolutely needed regardless the style of animation anyone do.
Also soundtrack support is necessary but for the moment the developers (one main for code and a few for packaging) are centred into kill bugs. (I'm pushing them to include new features )

Regarding to my cat animation and the time I spend on it you certainly should take into consideration two things:
1) I'm not really so skilled in animation.
2) That was the first time I did a four leg walking cycle.

And also, How many time you need to make a four legs walk cycle in Anime Studio without bones?
I'm a crazy bones fun and bones fully supporter and want to have them into Synfig. Maybe someday I can send a patch to have bones... Who knows.

[mkelley]

Genete,

I wasn't putting down your cat animation at all -- just agreeing that bones are very very necessary. So I'll be awaiting any bone type announcements for Synfig (please make sure you let everyone know -- I'd appreciate it).

And it's good to know lipsync is considered important by those developers (and yourself!) and efforts along those lines are being made. Sounds like the software is getting there which is good news for everyone (because competition is good even for AS -- you never know in the software world. If Synfig gets good enough, perhaps whoever owns AS at the time will make efforts to buy it out and incorporate it into AS. Or at the very least they will recognize the good in Synfig and try to respond).