storyboard question

[dabblz]

Hi Dabblz, Welcome to the TVPaint community !

thanks

TVP is marketed as a "professional" storyboarding product, isn't it?

No, TVPaint is marketed as a professional animation software that allows you to animate, create storyboard, turn them into animatics, use special FX, connect it to a webcam for line testing (for the ones who prefer the traditional way on paper), edit video, manage soundtracks, create lip-sync, color animation, imitate traditional rendering etc... TVPaint is not only dedicated to the storyboard / animatic functions, it's an all-in-one software.

understood, but am looking for pro storyboarding integrated into complex pipeline, other features are important (we have mixed 2d/3d) but this is the focus for now.

-printing each panel (clip) in a shot, with shot and panel numbers

If I understand you well, that's already the case

from reading this "storyboard question" thread, it seems users were complaining they could not designate which panels of the clips should be printed? Perhaps there is a bookmarking feature I have not discovered. I will try to search again while I am evaluating. Or, alternatively, I will try to accept that only the first panel of a clip will be printed, so I will adjust my thinking so that each clip is a "panel" - but I would prefer a function to set which frames of a clip are the "keys" like the old-school idea of a story key.

-easily creating industry-standard transitions, like cross-dissolve or a wipe between two shots, without being forced to descend into the individual clips and laboriously create layer transitions. Alternatively, please supply, or discuss, a macro/plugin for such a common task. (A cross-dissolve is probably the most common transition in film language besides a straight cut).
-ensuring that cross-dissolves and wipes can be exported and imported via EDLs, or some other robust method of moving back and forth between the TVP and standard editing programs like Adobe Premiere or FCP.

TVPaint is not a video editing software. This kind of feature is in our mind since we added the storyboard feature in September 2009, but unfortunately, that's not possible for the moment (the software would be too heavy to manage).

I feel I must disagree.
Firstly, in your 40-minute storyboarding help video on your site, you explain an incredibly complicated method of making a dissolve between two shots. Expecting non-programmer artists to type 000111's and make their own macro is not reasonable. This should be supplied as a standard macro with a button. This does not make the software any heavier, because the functionality already exists as demonstrated in the video.
Secondly, dissolve/fade/wipe are feature of competing storyboarding programs, including Toonz Storyplanner and ToonBoom Storyboard Pro. These are not video editing systems either, yet they can do it. Are these programs too heavy to manage?
Thirdly, fades / dissolves are such a commonly used transition, that some consideration towards improving your real-time video rendering-buffering-caching of your software would surely be greatly appreciated by your users and potential buyers. Even if you simply relied on lower-resolution video proxies to make things run faster. And, it seems you are already on the way to improving the video proxy rendering anyway.

-customizing, using, displaying, and printing industry standard terminology, like "scene" or "shot" as required.

Terms like "scene", "shot", "sequence", "act", "plan", "panel", have different meanings following if you are from the animation or from the live-movie industry (our software is used by the both industries). When we created the storyboard function, there was a huge debate with our beta-testers and finally, we decided to choose the words "scene" and "clip" in the TVPaint vocabulary
...users are free to use their own words if they prefer.

This is why users should be able to customize the terminology once, at the beginning of each project file setup, to suit the pipeline of their studio. The chosen terms should propagate, consistently, without requiring any further custom renaming. If "shot" is chosen as a prefix for all existing and new scenes in the project settings, and 2-digit numbering chosen, the numbering should continue automatically and should increment as Shot 02, Shot 03, etc. Alternatively, I might want to choose some completely custom prefix, like "marquis" or "straw" or Act01-Sc02 instead of "scene." Perhaps we need "panel" instead of "clip" because we have some people who are already using other tools which use those terms.

This is non-trivial. Yes, we are free to call them tomatoes or oranges or whatever we want, but please try to imagine how counter-productive and time-wasting communication will become when you are dealing with 4 studios in 4 countries, and some of the artists only speak a foreign language. This is a common situation in the industry today, and these artists are frequently confused if they hear some directors, supervisors or clients use different names for things than are actually written on the storyboard or the animatic, and we don't have time or staff to customize all the clip names by hand.

Further, if the starting shot number is 09, it would be useful to have shot number start from 09 instead of 1. Perhaps we want the numbers to automatically increment by 10 because we want 020, 030, 040, and so on. There is a lack of customization integrated with automated numbering.

-I like the idea of combining paint, animation, and editing features in one product, but without the above, this product is not a clear winner for pro storyboard artists or teams, against painting the panels in Photoshop, and editing them in Premiere. So why change?

You are free to use your pencil on your paper sheet, then scan them, edit them on photoshop, make them move via after effect and edit them in Premiere. Then use your storyboard / animatic a reference to start the animation via the software of your choice (or even do it on paper).
You are also free to draw all you storyboard, turn it quickly into an animatic by using the "timeline view", manage sounds, write notes, print your storyboard, use a camera tool and imagine the camera moves and see them on the screen, continue your storyboard and animate it, color it, add FX and finish completely your animation movie, just into only one software. Then, you can export it with an EDL and do the final montage into Premiere, Vegas or any other video software.
You're free to choose the way you prefer, we don't force anybody
Thanks for your comment and your suggestion !

We just draw them in Photoshop, and move them in Premiere, including camera moves. We record audio directly into Premiere too. Our lightweight still images are quickly editable with a paint program. We use custom titles in Premiere for shot info, action notes, dialog. Transitions and animatic renders are quickly handled in Premiere. This system is entrenched with the users I work with, and they don't like change. In order to get them to love TVP, it has to really be much better than the old system. Small advantages won't convert these people, and being the only TVP user among several people boarding different sequences would not be sustainable.
Sure, an EDL can be exported from TVP, but does this EDL contain transition instructions for dissolves? Possibly, but I suspect it is a complex process involving a custom layer dissolve, and I doubt this work practice will be popular in our teams. We want simple reliable dissolve transitions, ensuring that each of 2 adjoining shots is produced with all the extra frames required, with clear understanding and no mistakes on the part of the artists following the animatic.

[dabblz]

-easily creating industry-standard transitions, like cross-dissolve or a wipe between two shots, without being forced to descend into the individual clips and laboriously create layer transitions. Alternatively, please supply, or discuss, a macro/plugin for such a common task. (A cross-dissolve is probably the most common transition in film language besides a straight cut).

From this I assume you plan to do whole movies within only one application - which means you will have the whole movie within one file. I assure you this is not practicable at all. Even a 2 minute movie in one file will give you a file size in the Gigabytes, with long minutes to wait for every open and save action. Believe me, I've done that.

thanks for the info, but don't worry! we break up our boards into episodes or sequences, like we always do. For us, a collection of related shots which share a similar background location or story segment is a "scene," and there are often dissolves between two scenes. sometimes, there will be two scenes in one project file, and sometimes, a dissolve/wipe will occur within the same scene between two shots.

My issue is, it should be simpler to create a fade/dissolve/wipe between either two shots (scenes) or two clips. A standard macro could be supplied with the software. Technically, a transition between two scenes (shots) is the same as a dissolve between two clips, where all the layers of the clip have been pre-merged, and camera/layer moves pre-rendered. We are talking about drawings in a storyboard, which have less video data anyway, but even for full color this should not be very heavy, if low-detail video proxy files are used.

Also, let's face it. Storing all the heavy data in one tvp project file... of course this might be great for some projects, but I'm not sure this is the best way for scalability. The developers might eventually move to a smaller project file that contains nothing but XML, linked to a media database, where media is stored separately for each scene or clip.

I'm not replacing video editing, at all. Just looking for scalability, compatibility, and choosing a tool that can integrate well with a complex pipeline on larger projects, mainly for storyboarding at this stage, but for mixing 2d/3d on long form, later.

[slowtiger]

I'm a bit confused because there's a mix up two terms. "Storyboard" in my days was something drawn/printed on paper. Any dissolve was clearly marked with a big X, and everybody understood. Doing this in TVP has the advantage of immediately getting an "Animatic" - and this is where you might want to see a real dissolve.

Now please remember that TVP is optimised for animation, and all storyboard functionality came later, evolving from a simple index of clips to be printed.

[Elodie]

-printing each panel (clip) in a shot, with shot and panel numbers

If I understand you well, that's already the case

from reading this "storyboard question" thread, it seems users were complaining they could not designate which panels of the clips should be printed? Perhaps there is a bookmarking feature I have not discovered. I will try to search again while I am evaluating. Or, alternatively, I will try to accept that only the first panel of a clip will be printed, so I will adjust my thinking so that each clip is a "panel" - but I would prefer a function to set which frames of a clip are the "keys" like the old-school idea of a story key.

Animark already answered you about that :

- publishing different frames of one clip would be a nice feature
Now we can choose if we want to print the first frame of a clip OR one other frame when setting a bookmark to that frame. The first bookmarked frame will be printed. I can imagine, that there is a collision when having a couple of bookmarks and don't want all of them published - so maybe a solution could be, to have special publishing-bookmarks. But a possibility to choose between publishing one OR all bookmarks would be adequate for my personal use.

This feature is explained in the Lesson 9 : Create and Manage Storyboard
=> http://www.tvpaint.com/v2/content/artic ... manual.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

-easily creating industry-standard transitions, like cross-dissolve or a wipe between two shots, without being forced to descend into the individual clips and laboriously create layer transitions. Alternatively, please supply, or discuss, a macro/plugin for such a common task. (A cross-dissolve is probably the most common transition in film language besides a straight cut).
-ensuring that cross-dissolves and wipes can be exported and imported via EDLs, or some other robust method of moving back and forth between the TVP and standard editing programs like Adobe Premiere or FCP.

TVPaint is not a video editing software. This kind of feature is in our mind since we added the storyboard feature in September 2009, but unfortunately, that's not possible for the moment (the software would be too heavy to manage).

I feel I must disagree.
Firstly, in your 40-minute storyboarding help video on your site, you explain an incredibly complicated method of making a dissolve between two shots. Expecting non-programmer artists to type 000111's and make their own macro is not reasonable. This should be supplied as a standard macro with a button. This does not make the software any heavier, because the functionality already exists as demonstrated in the video.

This tutorial is an old tutorial video for TVPaint Animation 9.5 Professional Edition and is an advanced tutorial. It's not a tutorial for beginners, but for people who want to know much more about the software.

Secondly, dissolve/fade/wipe are feature of competing storyboarding programs, including Toonz Storyplanner and ToonBoom Storyboard Pro. These are not video editing systems either, yet they can do it. Are these programs too heavy to manage?

You can't compare :
These software are vectors based and only manage 1 image per shot.
TVPaint Animation is bitmap based and can manage several layers AND several images just into one shot.

It's a little like if you were comparing the taste of an apple pie and a pizza : both are food, they look similar (round pastry), but the first one is a dessert and the second one is a main course.

Thirdly, fades / dissolves are such a commonly used transition, that some consideration towards improving your real-time video rendering-buffering-caching of your software would surely be greatly appreciated by your users and potential buyers. Even if you simply relied on lower-resolution video proxies to make things run faster. And, it seems you are already on the way to improving the video proxy rendering anyway.

I already told you : it's not because we don't want, it's because we currently can't.
Be patient

But personally, from my own experience of the storyboard and animatic, I notice that fades in and this kind of effect are not that important. They are more like "visual bonus" than the keystone of your story. Most of storyboard / animatic I could work on never used this kind of transition, simply because it was not the work of the storyboard artist, but the role of the final film editor. (It's just my own opinion, not the TVPaint's opinon )

-customizing, using, displaying, and printing industry standard terminology, like "scene" or "shot" as required.

Terms like "scene", "shot", "sequence", "act", "plan", "panel", have different meanings following if you are from the animation or from the live-movie industry (our software is used by the both industries). When we created the storyboard function, there was a huge debate with our beta-testers and finally, we decided to choose the words "scene" and "clip" in the TVPaint vocabulary
...users are free to use their own words if they prefer.

This is why users should be able to customize the terminology once, at the beginning of each project file setup, to suit the pipeline of their studio. The chosen terms should propagate, consistently, without requiring any further custom renaming. If "shot" is chosen as a prefix for all existing and new scenes in the project settings, and 2-digit numbering chosen, the numbering should continue automatically and should increment as Shot 02, Shot 03, etc. Alternatively, I might want to choose some completely custom prefix, like "marquis" or "straw" or Act01-Sc02 instead of "scene." Perhaps we need "panel" instead of "clip" because we have some people who are already using other tools which use those terms.

This is non-trivial. Yes, we are free to call them tomatoes or oranges or whatever we want, but please try to imagine how counter-productive and time-wasting communication will become when you are dealing with 4 studios in 4 countries, and some of the artists only speak a foreign language. This is a common situation in the industry today, and these artists are frequently confused if they hear some directors, supervisors or clients use different names for things than are actually written on the storyboard or the animatic, and we don't have time or staff to customize all the clip names by hand.

Oh, in that case, just change the localization of the TVPaint text.
I don't remember how it is on Windows, but in Mac, you just have to right click on TVPaint Animation logo then :
Open package > contents > resources > data > and open "tvpaint.loc" with a text editor.
Then, for example, replace all the "scene" by "shot". Then, save the file, open TVPaint and TADAA ! all the vocabulary has changed.

But then, when you will ask for help to the TVPaint team, don't be surprised if we don't get a clue when you'll ask a question about shots and acts

Further, if the starting shot number is 09, it would be useful to have shot number start from 09 instead of 1. Perhaps we want the numbers to automatically increment by 10 because we want 020, 030, 040, and so on. There is a lack of customization integrated with automated numbering.

That makes sens for me

We just draw them in Photoshop, and move them in Premiere, including camera moves. We record audio directly into Premiere too. Our lightweight still images are quickly editable with a paint program. We use custom titles in Premiere for shot info, action notes, dialog. Transitions and animatic renders are quickly handled in Premiere. This system is entrenched with the users I work with, and they don't like change. In order to get them to love TVP, it has to really be much better than the old system. Small advantages won't convert these people, and being the only TVP user among several people boarding different sequences would not be sustainable.

But, once again, we don't force people to change you know
If the prefer to work image per image on Photoshop, then export and work on Premiere, that's their own choice.

There are still people working on paper, painting on glass with oil paint or animating with chalk on black board, after all. And we don't ask them to change their habits.

I think the main difference between working on Photoshop or TVPaint remains in the way you prefer build your movie. I think the TVPaint users prefer to work directly with the rhythm of their animations than on still images.

Sure, an EDL can be exported from TVP, but does this EDL contain transition instructions for dissolves?

As we don't included transitions for the animatic, it cannot include a feature that does not exist.

If you are talking about the transition and other FX in TVPaint that can be applied directly on the layers, it's another problem. As TVPaint is not an Video software, the FX needs bitmap to exist. So, they have to be applied directly on your layer.
As Premiere and TVPaint are not using the same technology for their FX, no, you can't export your animatic in EDL and keep the FX you used in TVPaint, except if you apply the FX on the layer. But in that case, you won't be able to change the applied FX anymore.

We want simple reliable dissolve transitions, ensuring that each of 2 adjoining shots is produced with all the extra frames required, with clear understanding and no mistakes on the part of the artists following the animatic.

Ok so, unfortunately, you'll have to be a little patient. We are working hard, but only have 4 developers you know

[dabblz]

I'm a bit confused because there's a mix up two terms. "Storyboard" in my days was something drawn/printed on paper. Any dissolve was clearly marked with a big X, and everybody understood. Doing this in TVP has the advantage of immediately getting an "Animatic" - and this is where you might want to see a real dissolve.
Now please remember that TVP is optimised for animation, and all storyboard functionality came later, evolving from a simple index of clips to be printed.

We usually prefer to keep our storyboard and animatic activity bundled together, as much as possible, allowing for back-and-forth revisions, sometimes with the same artist, rather than as separate processes. We use still image panels/layers, usually pngs or jpgs, either scanned, or drawn in Photoshop, and then edited in Premiere with simple movement, camera moves, and transitions, then rendered as an animatic with title overlays for the notes. The dissolve timings must be precise, so that artists can follow, and we usually revise our timings several times while drawing the board and timing the animatic. TVP is considered as an alternative, because its suits our preference to edit drawings and edit timings in one place. However, it doesn't have everything we need yet.

[dabblz]

Animark already answered you about that :

- publishing different frames of one clip would be a nice feature
Now we can choose if we want to print the first frame of a clip OR one other frame when setting a bookmark to that frame. The first bookmarked frame will be printed. I can imagine, that there is a collision when having a couple of bookmarks and don't want all of them published - so maybe a solution could be, to have special publishing-bookmarks. But a possibility to choose between publishing one OR all bookmarks would be adequate for my personal use.

This feature is explained in the Lesson 9 : Create and Manage Storyboard
=> http://www.tvpaint.com/v2/content/artic ... manual.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

ok thanks.
It would be nice if this "bookmarking" was like Animark was asking for. For me it is like "story keys."
I suppose I would normally just create a new clip per drawing. Simple enough, yes? Ok, but it might be nice to make some advanced features too. For example, it would be also nice if we can ID the frame number and flag it for publishing, somehow. I don't know how an animatic should display this information in a text overlay, but in a board it would be nice to flag these frames in the header above the frame, perhaps with a circle around the frame number. Of course this is useful for the animators, so they know which are the main poses they need to achieve. These "story keys" could also be used by an art department for identifying compositions to make color keys, or for rendering special marketing frames.

it seems you are already on the way to improving the video proxy rendering anyway.

Be patient

But personally, from my own experience of the storyboard and animatic, I notice that fades in and this kind of effect are not that important. They are more like "visual bonus" than the keystone of your story. Most of storyboard / animatic I could work on never used this kind of transition, simply because it was not the work of the storyboard artist, but the role of the final film editor. (It's just my own opinion, not the TVPaint's opinon )

We do both boarding and editing at the same time, during planning, then the storyboard/animatic is used by a team of artists & animators. These artists need to know when a dissolve is happening so they can do their work and time it correctly. They look for this information on the video, first, and being non-English-speakers, they might look in the storyboard shot notes "sometimes," depending on who they are, if they are in-house or outsourced, and who is taking care of them. We would prefer to gain more control over this. We don't want to simply just extend the shot for an un-natural period of time, then edit later. Instead, we prefer to see the dissolve, because it's a storytelling tool which helps shows that time is passing or we are changing locations, or some other powerful editorial meaning. These days, we are putting as much of these editing choices in the early stages as possible, to prevent mistakes and also so that everyone on the team including artists, clients, producers, etc, understand what is happening in whatever language they speak.

As I said to slowtiger, We usually prefer to keep our storyboard and animatic activity bundled together, as much as possible, allowing for back-and-forth revisions, sometimes with the same artist, rather than as separate processes... then render an animatic with title overlays for the notes... we usually revise our timings and drawings several times while drawing the board and timing the animatic. TVP is considered as an alternative, because its suits our preference to edit drawings and edit timings in one place. However, it doesn't have everything we need yet.

Another issue regarding titles, shot info, etc:
We render an animatic from Premiere with text overlays, to display shot data (shot number, dialog, notes). As you can imagine, this information must be limited (and semi-transparent), or it crowds the image. For our more detailed animatics, we render a re-sized video, with data displayed around the image, instead of over the video. It would be nice if we could export animatics and EDLs from TVP with shot data rendered as titles over the video or around the video.

This is why users should be able to customize the terminology once, at the beginning of each project file setup... as Shot 02, Shot 03, etc.
...4 studios in 4 countries, and some of the artists only speak a foreign language. This is a common situation in the industry today, and these artists are frequently confused if they hear some directors, supervisors or clients use different names for things than are actually written on the storyboard or the animatic, and we don't have time or staff to customize all the clip names by hand.

Oh, in that case, just change the localization of the TVPaint text.

Thanks for workaround/solution.
It would also be nice to be able to customize this per project setup, not per software install. Storyboard Pro allows this, to some limited degree.

In order to get them to love TVP, it has to really be much better than the old system. Small advantages won't convert these people, and being the only TVP user among several people boarding different sequences would not be sustainable.

But, once again, we don't force people to change you know
...
think the TVPaint users prefer to work directly with the rhythm of their animations than on still images.

Yes, and I'm trying to sell this idea to teams, not force them to change. Just convince/persuade them. We would like to work more directly with editing our drawings and editing our timings at the same time, just as you describe. We would like to do this as much as possible before using Premiere. We would like to find ways to work faster and be clearer, and the pre-production stage is the most important stage for us.

We want simple reliable dissolve transitions, ensuring that each of 2 adjoining shots is produced with all the extra frames required, with clear understanding and no mistakes on the part of the artists following the animatic.

Ok so, unfortunately, you'll have to be a little patient. We are working hard, but only have 4 developers you know

ok thks

[oferk]

I just saw this thread, and since it is not active for sometime, I guess I can take it to a slightly different direction, regarding storyboarding in tvpa. I recently storyboarded an animatic in Storyboard Pro 2. I must say, it is an incredible software, but
I do prefer to stay in tvpa only, because the transition to animation is much simpler, SBP2 is HEAVY and slow, and also the timeline and layers of tvpa are things I really miss in storyboard Pro. The two things I likes the most in SBP2 are the camera moves and the layer transforms.
I know you sort of have a camera in tvp, but the size of the project is constrained, and if you want a wider pan, or dolly etc., you must change the project size. Right? And if you have several shots in a project, all of them will be the same size, which can be confusing and a waste of space and memory, so you have to split it to several files. Also, editing the camera moves is limited, because the motion is pinned to the start and end of a clip, right? It is difficult to do cross-clip camera moves.
How are guys editing the camera when creating an animatic in tvpa?

The other point is the ability to transform layers to create simple motions. In SBP2 its very easy to create, but very cumbersome to edit once you want to change the timings, it is only practical for simple stuff. I know in TVP you have the keyframer, but it is also very difficult to edit. Maybe this feature is not something I will miss too much, since I can just move the characters manually per panel.

I guess my main concern is the camera moves, and project size.

[Elodie]

Thank you for your comments Oferk

I know you sort of have a camera in tvp, but the size of the project is constrained, and if you want a wider pan, or dolly etc., you must change the project size. Right? And if you have several shots in a project, all of them will be the same size, which can be confusing and a waste of space and memory, so you have to split it to several files. Also, editing the camera moves is limited, because the motion is pinned to the start and end of a clip, right? It is difficult to do cross-clip camera moves. How are guys editing the camera when creating an animatic in tvpa?

Some people will draw the clip with a big pan in another project. Then, they will render the camera and will copy paste the result to to the original storyboard.
That's a solution, but yes, I agree, it's a little constraining.
At the moment, we can't have different clips' size inside the same project, but I hope it will be possible in the future !

The other point is the ability to transform layers to create simple motions. In SBP2 its very easy to create, but very cumbersome to edit once you want to change the timings, it is only practical for simple stuff. I know in TVP you have the keyframer, but it is also very difficult to edit. Maybe this feature is not something I will miss too much, since I can just move the characters manually per panel.

Huh ? I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Why are you talking about the keyframer here ? You don't need to time your animatic

[oferk]

Thats OK, I think I need to test it and see if it works for me.
Thanks.