Auto-Lip Sync trouble

When I click ‘Auto Lip-Sync Detection’ Animate does an unusably bad job.

It might open the mouth a little at the start, and then close at the end and have nothing in the middle.
Or it might do nothing for most of the clip, and then wildly flail open and shut randomly for the last few seconds.

This seems like an error to me, as it seems much too bad and too consistent to just be a poor detection.

Some details:

Thanks for reading

Thank you for your fast reply Lilly! You’ve helped me many, many times before (through answering other people’s questions).

As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what I’m doing (I’m not double clicking on the Sound Editor, I’m double clicking on the sound layer’s heading to go into the Sound Element Editor - is that right?). I also did it by right clicking on the wave form in the timeline.

And it’s purely the preview I’m going by so far, I haven’t yet got to the next stage.

The sound file is professionally recorded in a sound dampening booth with a high quality microphone, with no other sounds.
The line isn’t gibberish either, they’re clearly divided words of a nicely varying volume - so we’re not just dealing with a weird line here.

Perhaps it did it badly the first time? Is there a way of clearing the current detection, and trying again?

I have this bad feeling I’m doing something stupid…

For the record, I opened a new project - and tried some of the same recordings.
It didn’t help - arguably worse even. Just some gasping and the occasional spasm. Sometimes it’s not detecting sound, when there is definitely sound.

Interestingly, I picked another old sound file from a previous project which has someone talking in a calm, natural voice (also .wav) and that worked fine.

That doesn’t help me much though. Problem is, I need the new batch of voices to work, and continue to work as we record the voice for the next year or two.

NOTE: This may have made it sound like the current voice is unintelligible, but it’s not - only in comparison to the old voice. It’s maybe a little raspy, and a little ‘jazzy’ but it’s pretty clear. We’re not talking Louis Armstrong here.

Hi

I might be interferring with a problem that Lilly’s about to solve here, so you’re welcome to ignore this post.

However… As I understand it

You’ve a set of mapped mouth shapes that won’t create a lipsync with a particular soundtrack but you can create a lipsync with the same mouthshapes if you use a different soundtrack.

1) In which order are you doing the “auto Lip Sync” and the “Map Lip Sync” in ?
2) What’s the name of the layer you have the mouth shapes in?
3) What convention are you using for naming the mouth shape drawings?
4) If you look at the library view of the mouth shape layer. How many drawings are there?
5) What parameters are you entering into the “Map lip Sync” dialog box?

Bob

Thanks Rob for your reply!
However I haven’t done any of that, the problem is right from the start.

I open a document → import sound file → auto-lip sync → and it’s from that point that the preview shows how badly it’s rendered. I haven’t connected it to any layer at all.
I have tried mapping it after that, just in case the problem was just with the preview, but no - the drawing shows the exact same bad match.

Here’s one of the files, if someone wanted to try it for themselves:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5IB7ARDY

I’ve had the trouble with this file, so if it works on someone else’s computer, I’ll know it must be something with my own method, software, or hardware.

Reduce your Sampling Rate from 96 kHz to 44.1 kHz…
I presume Animate is choking under that Sampling Rate…?

Regards
Nolan

Ah! That was it!

It works perfectly now, I’m so glad it was something simple and fixable like that - it so rarely is.

Thanks Nolan, you genius! And thanks to everyone else who helped.

I’d be surprised if I was the only one who ever had problems with that - Animate should have a warning message, or possibly a bug fix.

If anyone knows where I can submit such a report, please let me know!

Hmm I’m very surprised to hear this. You’re double-clicking on the sound editor to go into the sound window, then you’re selecting the sound and right-clicking on the sound and doing Auto-Lip Sync Detection? When you click play in the Sound Editor, does the preview show a better result?

Does the sound file have a lot of background noise? Is it just talking, or is there some music in the background?

~Lilly

I’ll pass on your feedback to the team so that we can let them know what the issue was. Thanks!

~Lilly