Organizing Shots in Separate Animate Files?

Retired Products Animate Tips and Tricks
1

I am about to undertake my longest project Toon Boom Animate (5 minutes, my last was almost 2. Could be a sneeze for some of you haha) and I was curious about the best way to organize my shots.

Back in Flash, I would make 1 “Scene” like 5 minutes long or so and then make a “Scene 2” when I felt it was appropriate (tried to split it up as if it were a DVD "scene select’ scene). In Toon Boom, I use a LOT more layers than Flash so the timeline can get messy fast.

But now I am seeing it is more professional and stable to break up shots in even MORE intervals, so which is the most popular or best way to do it?

A) ANY time the camera changes position, literally every new “shot”, gets it’s own Animate file

B) Segmented Animate files, but not strictly based on shots. Perhaps after a series of related shots

c) Still Segmented, but the Animate files are broken up arbitrarily, meaning you make a new file whenever you want.

I will be using After Effects and Adobe Premier to composite the shots, so I have no issue splitting them up, but I want to make sure I am not wasting time splitting more than I have to.

Thank you,

Aaron

2

Thanks a lot Lily, that really helps! Would you do the same for a fight scene wit h a lot of quick, short shots?

I also did not know SBP had that auto-project creation feature, so that is great to here whenever I get a chance to use it.

3

More Lilly advice

http://www.toonboom.com/support/forums/animate/index.php?board=17;action=display;threadid=1886

That thread needs to be stickied!

4

Usually what people do is they break it to a new scene file every time the camera changes. You can get away with putting several shots in one scene so long as you don’t see slow-down, but it’s best to break them up this way.

It can help also if you do your storyboards in SBP, because then you can export from your storyboard file to Animate Pro, and it will automatically break the scene files up for you, with the assets and the audio split up appropriately. But of course, if you don’t have SBP at your disposal, then you’ll have to make your best judgement of what’s going to work for you for your project.

~Lilly

5

Done!