Lookout - it's a newbie - basic questions

Retired Products Animate General Discussion
1

Hi, I’m a newbie to Toon Boom Animate, and yeah… I should probably read the user guide more closely but I have a couple of quick questions I’m sure you experts can answer – and probably have many times…. So sorry for that. I mostly work in Flash and am still getting my head around animate.
I’m creating an animated series something in the style of Family guy or The Simpsons and am importing a lot of Flas SWFs that I have to fix up in Animate.
1) In my initial attempts I have used the NTSC format – if you plan on pitching this stuff at TV or similar is this the way to go or can someone suggest a universal “we expect it in this format” resolution?
2) The tutorial videos say you can change the resolution on a scene you’ve already created in the scene settings tab (under scene) but nothing seems to happen. How do I know the format has been changed?
3) And this is the dumbest question I guess – but how do I join the scenes together, given that they may have different named (and number of) layers – or is this done when it’s rendered? If so – how?
Any advice would be welcome
Thanks,
Chris

2

Hi Chris

1) Pass (Bear in mind that you can change the format of a movie to meet a particular requirement)
2) To see changes to resolution export the movie. To test, export a low definition version of a small sample and then an HD version of the same sample.
3) There’s many a post about this. The options as I see them:-
a) Make a template of each scene and bring the templates together in a single project
b) Buy a third-party video editor (may not work if your target in *.swf)
c) Buy Adobe CS use this as a editor (expensive and is aimed at *.swf)

Hope this is of some help.

Bob

3

Thanks for your replies - I guess I have the flexibility to just go about creating the content and worrying about bringing it together later. I was worried I’d have to redo a lot of work. I don’t have access to a video editor but will look into it - thought the template / import option seems a good place to start.

4

i meant to ask, would rendering twice, as in first in Animate then later in a video editor, affect the visual quality of the one’s video?

5



If you want to make sure you are lossless, just render out images and import the sequence of images into your video editor.

6

Thanks TheRaider, that’s interesting…what video editor are you using if i may ask? mine is the cheapest i could buy and it unfortunately can’t play images at 1/24 seconds.

7

I use aftereffects currently since I have access to it at work, however I have used lots of different cheapers ones (including from adobe, blender, ulead video studio). A high percentage support import of frames, it is also the way any professional studio would do it.

Lilly always mentions quicktimepro as a good cheap option although I don’t know if that supports imports of sequences.

To do this you need one with supports import of sequences because it needs to be automated when you have 100’s or 1000’s of frames.

8
  1. These days most things are in HD, so this is probably a good format to go with. If you want to put things on the web, though, you’d go with a smaller format or a scaled-down size of HD.

    2) You will only see a change if you change the aspect ratio. Like if you go from 4:3 to 16:9, you will notice that the framing of the image differs slightly. Also of course as Roberto mentioned when you render you’ll see.

    3) In my opinion it’s best to go with a video editor. If you have access already to Premiere or Final Cut, then you can use those. Or you could go with something as simple as Quick Time Pro.

    Hope this helps.

    ~Lilly
9

I’m pretty sure you can do this in Quicktime Pro. I did a quick Google search and it seems like there are many people that do this. You might want to contact Apple just to be doubly-sure.

~Lilly