Lion and iBooks Author animation with TVPPro?

[Kathleen]

Chick-1.jpg (23.67 KiB) Viewed 12637 times

Since we Mac users are having to upgrade to Lion, 10.7.3, now, I have been waiting till the last minute. But now there is something only through having Lion that looks like a good reason to do so . iBooks Author is available for people to submit their books to iTunes for use on iPad. I am excited about this and am wondering if anyone here has heard how it works with TVP? My first book is a children's book about chickens and I want to animate it in TVPaint Pro.
I would love to hear any comments on this idea and any experiences anyone has had.

[meslin]

I can't speak to iBooks directly, but I did use TVP Professional extensively in the making of my iPhone/iPad game, "Cool Drops" (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cool-dro ... 31444?mt=8). You will be inevitably dealing with image stacks and then re-timing them on the Apple side of things (Xcode or iBooks, etc.).
TVPaint is a great way to achieve a hand-drawn style in an environment that's sometimes a bit too sterile. If anyone is interested, I'm happy to discuss any aspects of my pipeline.

Thanks,
David

[artfx]

You can submit books for sale or must they be free?

[Klaus Hoefs]

iBook Author is a free template based authoring tool for enhanced ebooks. Enhanced means that audio and video can be embedded. So far TVP can export H264,mp4 animation or you are able to convert your film (eg with QuickTime Player X) it is possible to have it in your iBook.
iBook Author is limited to export for iBook Store only (and non-interactive pdf = your animations won't run in pdf), you can't produce the platform-independent epub format.
You won't get your book to Barnes and Noble, amazon etc. with iBook Creator.
There are also the usual pro and cons of template based layout software; like you don't need any coding but you are restricted to those given layout-templates.

You can sell your iBooks (get 70 %), all you need is a tax payer ID etc. . I think easy to do for Americans, hard to get for foreigners, if you are a one man band.
You also need an Apple-account, a credit card, a special iTunes-app to manage your upload.
Apple is looking at your output which will take some time and is allowed to obliterate your book without any further notice.

IMO Apple is only one player on the fast growing ebook market. At all, the quality of lterary content can't compete with amazon, of course.
On the technical side amazon's mobi-format is out of date and has many issues in the creation process (but you can convert from epub), Apple's books are looking good and with the iPad they have the best reader for enhanced content by now.

[Kathleen]

Yes, free, but with some restrictions. I found the best information by going to the macApp store- to iBooks Author-support- tips...and in there is a lot of info on second party aggregators ( who do formatting and uploading for you for a fee), upload speeds and the like.
The iTunes account is free, of course. So is the iBookAuthors app, but must be running Lion to download it.
I don't (yet?) have an iPad, but they recommend one for previewing your book prior to uploading to iTunes Connect. (of course!)


Your information, Klaus, is helpful. I am still waiting to upgrade to Lion, so am doing my home work.
Have not got a handle on the file format they need, yet.
My big question is can we incorporate TVP animations into these books?

[Kathleen]

You can submit books for sale or must they be free?

artfx, You can submit for free (unless you use an aggregator), and then you can sell your books on iTunes or you can offer them free to anyone. Apparently when offered for free, you can distribute the book, (PDF) in other venues, but cannot if you charge for the book on iTunes.