Hey there. I’m EXTREMELY new to the program, and am still working through the trial download. While waiting for my company to just buy it outright, I’m trying to learn as much as possible about the software and work my way through tutorials, etc.
I’m working on an animation where I’ve recorded a voice track (Just myself babbling on to practice timing with) and have imported the track from an Mp4 file. I’ve imported it as instructed from the tutorials, and am timing my rough key frames of animation using the timeline slider to hear when the beats in the voice hit. But when I play the animation back, it falls out of sync with the audio more and more the longer the sound file plays back. It syncs up perfectly for the first few seconds, but starts to lag more and more the longer the sound file plays. (The total length of the sound file is 1595 frames)
This is consistant when I play the animation back exported as a quicktime file, or in playback in ToonBoom. Any assistance on this problem would be appreciated. Thanks
Hi,
Try cutting your sound in multiple smaller pieces of a couple of seconds at most.
Else then that make sure that you have the Streamed checkbox in the sound editor checked.
Best regards,
Ugo
Thanks. I double checked and I have checked “Streaming” as instructed. What’s REALLY odd, is that the sync only goes off when I play the animation back for an extended period. If I play a small chunk. Stop and play again, it stays in sync. If i drag the slider to the a specific section of animation and play for a few seconds, it’s fine anywhere along the 1595 frames. It just goes out of sync when I try and play it all at once. Strange.
Hi,
Would it be possible to know which format is your sound file? Also have you tried to cut the sound in multiple little pieces?
Regards,
Ugo
The sound file is an mpeg 4 (m4a) file.
I’m still tying to figure out how to cut the sound to begin with, since when I use the sound scrub bar in the timeline, everything is synched up fine. It only gives me problems in playback or output.
Should I just not use that to time by?
Hi,
If you get a delay in the playback or Quick Preview try with the Preview Scene. The previous two are not as precise as a full render.
Also do you get the offset in the final render to Quicktime.
If you are still having the same behavior you would have to edit the sound in an sound editing software and patch the sound back in Toon Boom Studio.
Best regards,
Ugo
I get the exact same delay in quick preview, outputting as a Quick time, AVI or Flash movie.
The track I’m working from is one, continuious 1 and a half minute sound file. It hasn’t been cut at all.
Hi,
In this case you should clearly cut it down in multiple small files. There is a current off synchronisation issue with quite long sound files. Try to cut that sound in segments of 10 seconds or so and see if you get better results.
Best regards,
Ugo
While I’ll certainly be following your advice concerning file length in future projects, I was finally able to engineer a solution by adjusting the frame rate of output.
I researched and saw that the mpeg4 files are an awkward frame rate of somewhere between 26 and 30 frames, so outputting at 12 frames a second of animation was too slow. I played around and found that setting my output to 14 frames synced up perfectly for what I needed.
I have purposely tried to stay out of this discussion but I am compelled to point out an important fact. Most render engines and playback mechanisms are designed to prioritize sound playback over graphical display generation. They also are normally designed to segment sound playback into fragments based on the frame rate. So the size of the sound fragments is significantly larger at 12 FPS than at 24 FPS because the number of subdivisions per sec is double at 24 FPS. The graphical generation load is the other factor. The more complex the graphical load per frame the harder the playback mechanism has to work to keep graphics and sound together. At a higher frame rate and using twos instead of ones at a lower frame rate means that there are two frames of sound matched up to one frame of graphical display load, as most of the time every other frame is a repeat and thus nothing needs to be produced graphically.
It is not a good idea to ever try to do any significant animation project at below 24 FPS. I have seen manufacturers promote the 12 to 15 FPS range and have always felt that they were incorrect in doing this. Most people who I know that make animation for a living, work at 24 FPS at a minimum and for SWF output it is not untypical to work at 30 FPS or slightly above. Beside the increased flexibility of timing this adds to the production of animated movements, there is, in fact, a solid argument for the improvement in sound to graphical image synchronization for the reasons I stated above. -JK