I create lip-synced files that are sometimes 2000 to 3000 frames long. I’d like to use happy mouths, normal mouths and sad mouths. Up until now, I’ve always had 3 different mouth layers for each view (mouth_front_happy, mouth_front_normal, mouth_front_sad). With a Quarter 1, Front and Quarter 3 view, that equals 9 different layers for the mouths. Doing it this way, each layer uses the standard A, B, C…X drawing mouth naming conventions, and it’s a piece of cake to map the lip sync to the layer.
I was just reading in the Harmony online help section and it recommended keeping all your mouths in one layer (sounds a lot cleaner and nicer than what I’ve been doing!). The only drawback is that you need to name each drawing like this:
f_n_a (front normal A)
q_s_g (quarter sad G)
I like this concept, but help me get past this tedious part of the procedure:
I break the audio up into 200 frame chunks so the software can do a better job of detecting the necessary drawings (because when I ask TB to detect a 2000 frame chunk of audio, the detection is horrible). Anyway, it’s necessary to duplicate the audio into multiple layers even if just for breaking it up into the sad and happy parts. Just so you get the visual, I’ll have 10 to 15 layers of duplicated audio, but say on the 2nd audio layer, I delete all the wave forms before frame 200 and after frame 400 so the detection only applies to the time between 200-400 and then only maps that portion of time to the mouth layer when I map it.
The annoying thing is that if you have a 2000 frame scene with happy mouth from 200 to 400, then sad from 400 to 1000, then happy from 1000 to 1100, then normal from 1100 to 1500, etc. Every time you go up to one of those audio layers and do the “Map lip sync” command, you have to type in to map the “A” to “f_h_a” and the “B” to “f_h_b” etc. I WISH that after I mapped the segment from 200 to 400, that I could go to map the audio layer associated with happy 1000 to happy 1100, and it would REMEMBER all the hassle I went through typing in “f_h_a”, “f_h_b” etc. instead of resetting to the default map “A” to “A”, “B” to “B”. If I’m going to have to re-type those f_h_a names in EVERY single time I “Map lip sync”, it’s easier to just keep the 9 different layers with standard frame naming conventions of A, B, C, etc, though I would MUCH rather have all the mouths in a single layer named f_h_a, f_h_b, f_h_c etc.