Timing Clips in an Animatic/ Storyboard?

[melissam]

Hey guys, this may be a simple matter, but as of now it's confusing me -_--
So I'm making an animation to a music track. From my understanding, I can have animations inside each scene.. And that's what I've been doing. But now, my question is, how do I time the animations within each scene? When I'm in the project tab, I can select "Timeline View" and edit the timing of each scene to the music, but once I double click on a scene and get into the clips of each scene, I don't understand how to time it to the music.

Any advice? It would be much appreciated.
Thanks

[ematecki]

Which version of TVPaint are you using ?

[Elodie]

Hey Melissa, I asume you are the person who posted on Dailymotion, aren't you ?

As Ematecki said, please tell us what is your version : the feature you are looking for only exists in TVPaint 10, not in TVPaint 9.

[melissam]

Oh, It's version 10 pro
And yeahh I was the person from daily motion haha!

[Elodie]

It's time to upgrade : we are proposing a discount until the end of the month

[melissam]

Ok, so the problem will be addressed in the newer version? But there has to be a way to do it in version 10 as well, right? :0

[Elodie]

I don't understand your question : I am only talking about TVPaint 10.

[melissam]

Right; I am using TVP version 10. my question is that I'm not understanding how to time the individual clips in the "Clip Timeline" tab. I can edit the timing of things in the project view, but I want to know how to time the animations within the Clip timeline as well, so that everything moves when I want it to.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Are you talking about timing (synching up) to a soundtrack?

[melissam]

yes

[Paul Fierlinger]

Well, you can either load individual soundtracks into your clips (It's at the top of the timeline, one of those thin horizontal lines under the Project/Clip:Timeline/Clip:X sheet tabs. Drag the line down to widen the space and discover where to load tracks. Or you can load a long track thata covers all your clips in the Project tab and use a command to break that track into separate clips and you will then find these already in the clip when you go back there. But I don't think this feature is in all TVP 10 versions and this must be the reason why you were asked which version of TVP 10 you have.

[melissam]

Hey Paul, thanks for your response. Yeah, I knew about the "Split tracks to clips" function, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. But I think the best thing might be to just copy some of the clips from the clip timeline view into new scenes, so that I can time it out better in the project timeline view. In other words it seems like it's better to not have too much animation in a scene because it's hard to time it to the master music track when you're in clip timeline view.
Thanks for your input!
Melissa

[Paul Fierlinger]

The way I work is that I draw the storyboard in the thumbnail view and stretch them out in the Timeline to about 5 seconds. When I have about a dozen clips (never more because the project becomes too heavy) I export these as Motion-JPEG AVIs to my NLE Vegas Pro, where I match them up to my soundtrack, usually a music track still in development but it could also be a narration track. Here, I stretch each clip to its proper length in relation to the sound track.

Next, in the NLE I create *.WAV copies of each clip, which I import into my TVP's clips and start animating to the sound (I never animate without a soundtrack if I can help it). In TVP, if it's a VO track, I make notes of the vowels in the Note Track above the Soundtrack and first draw the character's key poses relative to its VO, including the mouth and face features matching the vowels.
Then the usual inbetweening follows. I never, ever use paste in mouth shapes but always draw the entire face and body language around the mouth.

When I'm animating to music only, or primarily, I export several times in the course of the day my WIP clips back to my NLE. Whenever my composer sends me updates to his track I load these into the NLE and again split the music into individual clips there, instead of in TVP. From the NLE I replace the old clips in TVP with these new ones. Whenever I have more animation done, I send an Mp4 file to my composer so that he can adapt his music to my changes.

The reason I prefer to do all this outside of TVP is that the editing and mixing of sounds has more latitude and I can play all the clips together and watch them full screen on a large monitor while I adjust the mix levels on the NLE's mixing board.

Some people interact between TVP and their NLEs with JPEG image sequences instead of using AVI clips and I used to work that way too. Both systems have their own advantages and disadvantages, also depending on the capabilities of the NLE.

BTW, Vegas and most of the other popular NLEs have Lite versions which cost a lot less ($80 versus $700 for Vegas) and these are perfectly adequate for our type of work. All the bells and whistles of the full NLE versions pertain to cameras and special effects which we don't need.

If I'm telling you things you already know, I apologize but did this just in case someone with less experience comes along, lured by the heading you gave this thread.

[melissam]

The way I work is that I draw the storyboard in the thumbnail view and stretch them out in the Timeline to about 5 seconds. When I have about a dozen clips (never more because the project becomes too heavy) I export these as Motion-JPEG AVIs to my NLE Vegas Pro, where I match them up to my soundtrack, usually a music track still in development but it could also be a narration track. Here, I stretch each clip to its proper length in relation to the sound track.

Next, in the NLE I create *.WAV copies of each clip, which I import into my TVP's clips and start animating to the sound (I never animate without a soundtrack if I can help it). In TVP, if it's a VO track, I make notes of the vowels in the Note Track above the Soundtrack and first draw the character's key poses relative to its VO, including the mouth and face features matching the vowels.
Then the usual inbetweening follows. I never, ever use paste in mouth shapes but always draw the entire face and body language around the mouth.

When I'm animating to music only, or primarily, I export several times in the course of the day my WIP clips back to my NLE. Whenever my composer sends me updates to his track I load these into the NLE and again split the music into individual clips there, instead of in TVP. From the NLE I replace the old clips in TVP with these new ones. Whenever I have more animation done, I send an Mp4 file to my composer so that he can adapt his music to my changes.

The reason I prefer to do all this outside of TVP is that the editing and mixing of sounds has more latitude and I can play all the clips together and watch them full screen on a large monitor while I adjust the mix levels on the NLE's mixing board.

Some people interact between TVP and their NLEs with JPEG image sequences instead of using AVI clips and I used to work that way too. Both systems have their own advantages and disadvantages, also depending on the capabilities of the NLE.

BTW, Vegas and most of the other popular NLEs have Lite versions which cost a lot less ($80 versus $700 for Vegas) and these are perfectly adequate for our type of work. All the bells and whistles of the full NLE versions pertain to cameras and special effects which we don't need.

If I'm telling you things you already know, I apologize but did this just in case someone with less experience comes along, lured by the heading you gave this thread.

Wow, thanks for explaining your process! it does seem that editing to music might be easier in another program, especially for something as complicated as the things you do.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Particularly when it comes to longer projects; I'd say anything above two or three minutes becomes cumbersome to sound edit in TVP, which really doesn't even pretend to be an editing program. Though I am fond of TVP's very rudimentary multitrack editing capabilities, particularly when it comes to placing SFX, which is often best done where you draw -- at least as a trial pre-edit.