Assigning drawings to different layers, Drawing Substitution

Here is a short video showing a work in progress (also a learning process). I have just exported a scene from our STORYBOARD PRO animatic into ANIMATE. The sound track has been imported too, and the animatic drawing is in its own layer in bitmap format.

Assigning drawings to separate layers

At this stage I have (roughly) animated the camera move and roughed out a layout drawing over the imported bitmap layer. There is a neat feature in ANIMATE where you can quickly copy or cut out drawings from one layer and "Paste In Place" (to use Flash lingo) on other layers. First, use the Cutter tool to cut out that drawing, then use F9 to assign it to another new or existing layer. This beats going through the motions of Copying and Pasting...

Our only gripe is that the ANIMATE Cutter tool isn't very precise and we wish that it worked more like a Flash or Photoshop lasso where you can select parts of strokes, rather than entire strokes...

I have also started drawing rough key animation poses for each character (Rocquita, Indigo and Joe 101) and when I want to reuse an earlier drawing, I can swap using the Library's Drawing Substitution Window ... just scroll to the drawing you want to swap with... This is really cool. In Flash, only Symbols are swappable, but in ANIMATE, ALL drawings on a layer are swappable.

I also think it's super cool to be able to animate the characters with the camera move already done.

SIDENOTE: My OS is Windows Vista 64-bit and it is painfully slow to draw and paint. Especially when the Auto-Flatten feature is enabled in my BRUSH Tool Properties Window. Also when I have the Onion skinning on. I was sketching with both these features enabled, and ANIMATE suddenly crashed and shut down on me. Must remember to keep SAVING!!!

UPDATE: Thanks to Eric for the tip about holding down "Alt" when using the Cutter tool. This helps!!!

Storyboard Pro: Exporting to Quicktime + UPDATE

Rocquita Animatic - Scene 14 from Eddie Mort on Vimeo.

UPDATE: After tests on the animatic on different computers at Toonboom and here, the conclusion was reached that the problem lay with my computer, and not Storyboard Pro. Oops. Lili was able to export the 100+ scenes with sound in a matter of minutes. -Eddie

I published this Quicktime to test Storyboard Pro's 'Export Movie' capabilities. Despite using the lowest picture/audio settings this scene still took 48 1/2 minutes to export to Quicktime! That's right - over 48 minutes to render a 3-second scene. With a 10-minute animatic to export, I am understandably freaking out over how long this will take.

[Waiting for reply from Toonboom Support]

Anyone else created an animatic (with sound)? What was your rendering time?

Also: I'm not real happy with the intrusive display - I.E. scene number, running time etc. I'm not sure why it has been devised to appear over the visuals, rather than in the top corner. Yes, you do have the option to forego this at export stage, but this information is necessary if you are working on a studio production.

UPDATE: We discovered that we could SUCCESSFULLY render the animatic on my PC (it was pretty fast), so the rendering problem was with Eddie's PC. We're not sure why, if it's a processor speed thing or something else...

10 minutes of animatic (with dialog wav files, but no music and no camera moves yet) took about 5 minutes to render.

Storyboard Pro: Sound Editing

Adding Sound to Animatic

As demonstrated by Eddie in Storyboard Pro

storyboard pro, animatic, sound

Storyboard Pro: From Storyboard to Animatic

Toonboom Storyboard Pro - Creating ROCQUITA Animatic 

Eddie had already created the storyboard for our ROCQUITA pilot in STORYBOARD PRO. Some panels were drawn directly in SB PRO; others were drawn in Flash and imported as swfs. In this video, he is importing dialog tracks into SB PRO and timing out each scene. 

Sidenote: Storyboard Pro exports to Quicktime, SWF or Image Sequence.

We could also export the whole storyboard (no sound) to PDF format though this takes hours to do, depending on how long your board is. In the case of ROCQUITA, there are 148 scenes and it took about 6 hours (!) to render to a PDF file. 

A new blog

Welcome! A new blog to document our experiences learning and using Toonboom's new ANIMATE animation software.

We were first introduced to Toonboom's products back in June 2006, and attended a training session organized by Joel Kuwahara of Film Roman. It was a two-week part-time course and we touched lightly upon every feature of Toonboom SOLO (which then became DIGITAL PRO).

We were impressed with Toonboom SOLO but we didn't make the switch from Flash to Toonboom at the time because we had already started production on an animated feature (Los Campeones De La Lucha Libre) using Flash. What an experience that was, and it pushed us towards finding a more reliable all-inclusive animator-friendly program to serve our needs...

In 2008, we travelled to Montreal to meet with Toonboom and received hands-on training in DIGITAL PRO for an intensive 3-4 days.

This year we are making the big switch. ANIMATE appears to be a more streamlined, lighter, simpler and cleaner version of DIGITAL PRO. It is also more affordably, in the same price range as FLASH. Much easier to use, less clunky. Yes, there is a learning curve when switching from Flash - both thrilling and frustrating but ultimately, rewarding. This blog is a place to record and share parts of our working process. Feel free to leave comments with your experiences, questions and answers!

SOME LINKS:

• Toonboom Forums
  
• ColdHardFlash.com - Posts tagged with Toon Boom
• CartoonSmart.com - Free ANIMATE Tutorials (Character rigging etc.)