Breaking one scene into many?

Hi all.

I’ve done some storyboards in Toon Boom Studio, timed them out, and added camera moves. I was wondering how I could cut the shots up and paste them in their own individual scenes instead of one big long one. It’s about a minute and a half, so that’s a lot of scrolling to animate on!

I tried copying and pasting frames like you can do in flash, but it was a no go. Forgive my newb-ness at TBS here, but how else might I be able to do this while maintaining the timing/camera? If that’s at all possible.

Cheers!

This is relatively easy to do in TBS. You will want to create templates for each section (scene/shots) along your timeline and place those templates into your Global library. Then you can create the desired number of new scenes in your scene manager panel and one by one go to that next scene and drag the desired template from your global library on to that scene’s timeline. A TBS template is copied from the library to the timeline by drag and drop.

Here are the steps to make this happen:

I am assuming that you have multiple elements in your current timeline. In the example you described you might have an element for your story board art, a peg for the camera and the camera itself. So I’ll assume three timeline tracks are present.

1. Your first step is to add a top level peg element to your timeline.

2. And to attach all the other tracks that exist in your time line to that top level peg. To do that you shift-select all the tracks below your top level peg and drag them up and on top of that top level peg and drop them.

3. Next you want to make note of the beginning and ending frames of each section that you want to make into a separate template. For grins we will assume you have 10 sections and will be making ten templates. You need to write these down because you won’t be able to see your tracks below your top parent when it is collapsed.

4. So now you are ready to start doing that. You begin by collapsing the top level peg for your total hierarchy of elements.

5. Now go to the beginning frame of your first timeline section and select that frame then hold down the shift key and select all the rest of the frames for that section up to and including the end frame for that section.

6. With that sequence of frames selected you just drag that selection of peg element to your library panel and drop that selection in your global library catalog. It has to be the global library catalog in order for these templates to be available to any scene in your project or any other project. When you drop the dragged selection into the global library catalog it becomes a template copy of the selected frames for the peg and all its children.

7. You then will right click on that template in your library panel and rename it something meaningful like a section number so that you will know the order of reconstruction of your timeline into your new scenes.

8. Save your project before proceeding, this also saves your global library at the same time.

9. You will repeat this process until you have all the sections of your timeline converted into templates.

10. Then it is just a matter of creating the new scenes in your scene manager panel and going to them one at a time and dragging and dropping the appropriate section template to that scene’s timeline. Because you have a camera included in your templates you will end up with the default camera track in each new scene as an unneeded track so just un-check that extra default camera’s track.

You don’t need to modify or delete your original scene, just un-check it in the scene manager panel’s scene list and it will be omitted from any renderings of your project. You can also drag and reorder scenes in the scene manager panel if you want to play with your story flow. -JK

That was brilliant! :smiley:

Thank you so much for your prompt and concise response, it worked like a charm. I had to make sure I selected the right camera in the shots, as it wasn’t moving for a bit there, but it’s fine now. I also like how you don’t have to cut up the audio track as well, but can leave it on the first scene and it will play right through with no timing issues (as far as I could tell anyway).

Thank you once again. Really appreciate the help!

Now I don’t have to feel so daunted by the sheer number of frames in the whole movie. Piece by piece instead!

This is awesome! I was about to tackle a LOOONG scene in my project, too…longer than a minute and a half, too…yikes.

so, bleupencil, you didn’t add the audio track to your top peg element and cut it up? It just plays right through. I would’ve thought you’d have to include the sound element when you connect everything to the Peg element and cut it up.

Well, I’m gonna go try it now, anyway.

Thanks, folks!