I’m working on a project that changes from shot to shot (e.g., front to side perspectives; different characters far away from where the camera is) and I would LOVE to know the easiest way to cut n’ paste one shot to the next. You would think a Ctrl+C and a Ctrl+V would suffice, but it gets all wonky. I did the paste special, with better success, but it’s still not behaving the way I want, for instance, it’s filling frames from a puppet that had empty frames.
Wondering if my puppets should be collapsed / if I should only copy and paste keyframes. Basically, can someone give me a heads up when it comes to switching from shot to shot…
I’m using Animate 2
Thanks, - toddunt
First thing to make sure is make sure that the hierarchy structure is the same on both of your puppets.
Next thing, make sure that before you save the template, you have a keyframe on the first frame of ALL the layers in that character (it’s easiest to collapse the character and then create a keyframe, and it will keyframe that layer and all its children). You need a keyframe so that when you drag and drop different views on top of each other, all of the layer positions are the same as they were when you created them.
Third thing, when you create your templates, these are master templates, so you should be dragging and dropping from the LEFT side of the timeline - by selecting the layers - NOT by selecting cells on the right side of the timeline.
Now that you have your templates saved, if you drag and drop one template onto your scene, animate it for a while, then you should be able to drag and drop your other template directly on top of the first one. Since the hierarchies are the same, it should appear as orange, telling you it’s okay to drop. Since there’s a keyframe, the layer order should stay intact.
Where exactly are you facing a problem?
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
Hi Lilly, lemme illustrate the example.
One shot is three characters in side views, all rigged, with various prop layers about (two lawn chairs, and pitcher of lemonade). The next shot is just a closeup of one character’s face, front view, different background art.
I go back and forth a little bit, so I just cut and paste the frames I want to show the next shot, but it tends to be less than perfect. So I’m wondering if there is a ‘best practices’ for going back and forth from the same shot to the next.
Todd
For some reason I’m not quite understanding what you’re doing here…
When you switch from one view to another, why are you copying and pasting your character? Have you added a camera with a peg to your scene? If so, then you can just put a keyframe on the camera peg on the last frame of the first scene, then another on the first frame of the next scene, and it will jump from one position to another.
Or are these in two separate project files? If you’re working on separate project files, then simply create a template of the scene by selecting all the layers on the left hand side of the timeline and dragging them into the library. Then you can drag and drop them into the new project, set up your new camera, and delete any drawing layers that you don’t need.
Was any of that what you were looking for?
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
Lilly, did you have a chance to look at that file I sent you?
Todd
Hi Todd,
I just did. I sent you an email, but I’m copying what I wrote in this email here so that everyone can benefit from it:
I took a look at the PDF here and from what I can tell you’re using 2 different backgrounds - one background for shots 1 and 3, and one background for shots 2, 4, and 5. So what you need to do is a combination of two things: camera keyframes and drawing substitution.
First what you should do is you should import the two backgrounds. Import and vectorise as colour (don’t stick it in a symbol) the first background onto your background layer - I’ll call this layer BG. Now, import the second background onto the SAME layer. Now this background should show up on frame 1, and the old background should show up on frame 2. If you scroll through the drawings that appear in your drawing substitution window in the library, you will now see that these two drawings are available for drawing swapping (you can also use the keys [ and ] to swap drawings on the timeline). Now all you need to do is expose the appropriate drawing on the appropriate frame.
Now the second thing you need to do, and this is to get the zooms that you need in each shot (i.e. for shot 2, 4, and 5 it’s all the same background but different zoom levels) you need to have a camera with a peg attached to it and some keyframes.
In the end your timeline should look something like the following (I’m denoting a keyframe here by a colon, : ) :
BG | -------BG1----------|--------------BG2-----------|------------BG1----------|------------BG2----------------------|
Camera-P |:-----------------------: :-----------------------------: :---------------------------: :-------------------: :-----------------|
. → Camera
. (shot 1) (shot 2) (shot 3) (shot 4) (shot 5)
Now the way I’ve set it up on that peg, I’m using motion keyframes, so I have two keyframes for each shot - the start position and the end position. I did this in case you want to have some camera movement during the shot. Now you can also simply set the keyframes to stop-motion keyframes, and then have one keyframe per shot only, but in this case then you won’t have any camera movement.
Now notice that for shot 4 and 5, it’s using the same background, so I don’t have to change anything about the background here - I simply expose it for both shots, then I set keyframes to get the difference in the camera for the two shots.
See the following screenshot:
http://i790.photobucket.com/albums/yy184/lillybirdsong/ToonBoom/Picture1-1.png
