In Sync Animation

[Gochris1]

If you don't like the staccato sound you get when scrubbing TV Paint's timeline, try using your editing software as a sound track reader. I use Vegas 4 to edit with. When I scrub sound back and forth in Vegas, I don't hear a staccato, I hear the sound playing backwards and forwards.

1. Make sure your editing software and TV paint are both using the same frame rate
2. Scrub the sound until you find the exact beat or note or sound effect or dialogue that you want to sync the animation to
3. Write down the frame number where you want the animation to sync to the sound
4. In TV Paint, make sure the animation happens on the frame number you wrote down
5. At this point, the sound and animation should be in sync
6. This allows you to have a friend do track your reading while you do other things... like sleep.

[slowtiger]

Although I am used to the old tape machine scrubbing which slows down the speed and lowers the pitch, I can work as well with that staccato digital scrubbing, it only hurts my ears more. (My first musical compositions were done with real tape splicing ... go figure.)

[Paul Fierlinger]

I find TVPaint's sound track reading system the best! How can anything be more precise than digital readouts when you are searching for the sound of single frames, particularly if the tracks are recorded digitally in the first place? I love the way I can make notations right above the tracks and the scrubbing can be done in several places across the GUI.

I think the trick is that when I read tracks I am listening for the sounds of individual frames, not what comes before it or after, exactly the staccato sound that bothers you is what I consider a necessity to get the perfect readout. I believe this is something you could train your ears to listen for. I too have Vegas and find it much harder to pinpoint individual frames.

[slowtiger]

Yes, it is in fact a matter of training. I remember how utterly distracted I was when I heard my first digital scrubbing. But I have the advantage of splicing sounds since the old days of real tape machines, and now in samplers, and still do it all by ear.

I can work with the staccato scrubbing as exactly as with the old way, but, as I said, it's more stressful to the ear - in the same way as digital noise reduction in phones is painful for me. This is caused by the highly unnatural sequence of sound (often distorted) and total silence, which our aural system isn't designed for. It is built for continuous sound so it can compute it and decide which part is useful sound and which is noise. This computation works best with longer noise samples so the useful information sticks out more clearly. A noise reduction like in phones interrupts everything, thus spoiling our in-built computation completely.

The same mechanism works in staccato scrubbing, so our inner-ear computation can't kick in. Fortunately most sound we work with in animation is very clean audio (voice) recording with no need to filter noise, we only need to distinguish phonemes. But still the unnatural silent bits inbetween cause stress to our hearing system, so, as I said, I can work with it, but I prefer continuous sound.

A nice compromise is implemented in many sound editing software in musical context. It uses grain sampling to fill the holes between the soundbits, creating a time stretch effect without altering the pitch. For use in animation, this method only needs to have an audible level diference between the "real" samples and the "filler" ones.

[Paul Fierlinger]

This is very interesting. I closely watch the sound wave as I scrub and it makes me often wonder, why am I looking at this graph so intently since there are never any surprises; I hear what I see, but something always makes me watch very intently anyway.

Based on your explanation of filters, the visual perception perhaps makes up for the missing sound filter. The visual isn't just a confirmation that what I hear is truly what it is, but it tells me what to expect and prevents me from receiving these mini jolts of silence, thus functions as a faux sound filter. What confirms me that this must be the case is that I always optimize the graph even though the reduced one is still very easy to see and after having been aware of this quirkiness from the beginning, I can now understand how this makes sense.

[User767]

Slowtiger's comments: agreed.

Setting up scenes and keyframes, I don't much care. I've usually listened to the audio about a hundred times by the time I do that, and the combination of visual waveforms and the audio to reinforce where I am works OK. But when actually animating, scrubbing/flipping frames for flow, that 'glip glip glip' is horrible. Toon Boom does sound a little nicer. I think Harmony even a little nicer than that. Logic's scrubbing is great. Sounds like tape.

A TV show pre production with a lot of music had massive dislike of TVP because of that.

[malcooning]

I'd appreciate it if sound were dealt with on a 'sub-frame' level. Now, I guess I need to find prior examples. Though I don't think anyone here cared anyway.

People here do care so reiterating this won't get you more solidarity.
Instead, you can elaborate for what purpose exactly you need sound to allow sub-frame accuracy. For many users the current way things work in TVP now is taken for granted, and therefore solutions for sounds accuracy are found with one method or another. If you have an idea how to improve such functions, manifest them and exemplify them for other users to recognize the benefit of your suggested improvements.

TVP's repeat staccato sound when scrubbing drives me nuts-especially when I'm doing something to music. Most of the people I've worked with don't seem to like it either. It's nice to hear the dynamics of the music relative to the animation.

I also prefer the tape-style pitched scrubbing method. Hopefully the scrub method will be replaced in future. Still, you can smooth out the staccato in TVP quite a bit by playing with the Scrub duration value in the preferences panel (Sound tab).

[slowtiger]

Remember that for all sub-frame accuracy, you'll most likely will change the sync when editing the movie. In "Illusion of LIfe" it's mentioned that often the action preceeds the sound for a full 3 frames, one example from Pinocchio even was 8 frames anhead. I've noticed this myself, this is one of the reasons why it's a good idea to have some additional frames padding every scene: you might need the extra frames to shift the scene in editing.

[User767]

People here do care so reiterating this won't get you more solidarity.
Instead, you can elaborate for what purpose exactly you need sound to allow sub-frame accuracy. For many users the current way things work in TVP now is taken for granted, and therefore solutions for sounds accuracy are found with one method or another. If you have an idea how to improve such functions, manifest them and exemplify them for other users to recognize the benefit of your suggested improvements.

I also prefer the tape-style pitched scrubbing method. Hopefully the scrub method will be replaced in future. Still, you can smooth out the staccato in TVP quite a bit by playing with the Scrub duration value in the preferences panel (Sound tab).

Somewhere here (a couple of years ago-under a different screen name, since I was deleted and forced to reregister), I posted sound files with descriptions and commentary as examples. I don't remember anyone commenting that 'tape scrubbing' would be preferred (same thing at bauhaus). Paul commented that the way it is now is perfect for him. Got the suggestions about changing numbers, which helps, but doesn't 'solve'. Not expecting 'solidarity' at all.

Wanting sub-frame audio accuracy doesn't seem all that unreasonable. Especially if you're working at 12FPS (or even less). Those chunks of sound can get pretty big. Editing software is harder to deal with if you can't slip sound in sub frame increments too. Half a frame out is sometimes enough to not work. More important, I just want it for aural comfort.

Most of what I do goes to TV, and it's generally two or three frames out. Action and audio during animation seem to synch fine once in editing if I keep that in mind. Very rarely do I need to go back and add frames (though I have had to).

I also try to avoid fluorescent lights when I'm working, as the 'flicker' gets a little tiring after a while too. Percussive anything all day is hard to deal with. Maybe it's just that I'm too fussy, and intolerant? Just some cranky old man, who will be asking the software to come with a masseuse next, right?

[Paul Fierlinger]

To register a sound bite of less than a frame's length is superfluous if all you can draw is one frame. How can the equivelant of 24fps or 30fps be useful to anyone who draws at 12 fps? When I come across a soundtrack that doesn't give me enough information at 12 fps, I change that project's rate to 24 fps and draw with double the amount of detail.

As for the comfort level... well, how much of our work has high comfort levels built in to it? My back and posture are completely destroyed from years of sitting, hunched over a drawing -- I take that back, hundreds of thousands of drawings. It got so bad I had to spend a good chunk of money on a special chair. Should I complain... and to whom; TVPaint or Wacom?

What percentage of your total production time do you have to spend listening to those jarring sounds (I'm talking about track reading time, not scrubbing)? If scrubbing becomes jarring to me after too many hours of drawing in synch to sound, I turn down the volume completely and go by my notes scribbled above the sound track.For that reason I suggested as a beta tester that we be able to see these notes on top of our project window (yes, I proudly take credit for that).

BTW, could you let us see some of your work? It sounds interesting .

[slowtiger]

If I need sub-frame accuracy on sound, I'd do it in edit, not in animation, because I have the necessary tools there and sound is much more forgiving to tweaks than animation. I can shift sound bytes in time, I can time-stretch them if necessary, and I can cover holes between sounds more easily.

[Fabrice]

Interesting topic here, especially for the future versions. Thanks everybody.

[User767]

As for the comfort level... well, how much of our work has high comfort levels built in to it? My back and posture are completely destroyed from years of sitting, hunched over a drawing -- I take that back, hundreds of thousands of drawings. It got so bad I had to spend a good chunk of money on a special chair. Should I complain... and to whom; TVPaint or Wacom?

Sorry for your suffering. I think that might be a differentiation between us. You suffer to produce your art. I'm a wimp, and I don't like to put up with discomfort, but I'm a hack. I try to minimize anything that distracts me from my work.

I don't hunch over my drawing, I don't want to work around some software sound that annoys me, I don't want to listen to leaf blowers, I have a comfy chair, and I usually only draw on the computer for about two hours before I have to take a break (because staring at the screen annoys my eyes). Perhaps I'm in the wrong business?

Subframe audio is more about the scrubbing bit. Post production offers it, why not while in production too?

To register a sound bite of less than a frame's length is superfluous if all you can draw is one frame. How can the equivelant of 24fps or 30fps be useful to anyone who draws at 12 fps? When I come across a soundtrack that doesn't give me enough information at 12 fps, I change that project's rate to 24 fps and draw with double the amount of detail.

I have to up frame rates at times to deal with this. Sounds like you've had the same experience. So you do understand! But, again, you're willing to suffer for your art, but I'm not doing art, so I don't want to suffer. While persistence of vision allows for lower frame rates, I don't think there's a similar persistence of hearing. 1/48th (or 1/24th or whatever) second of sound is a pretty big chunk, to my ears.

Maybe if you did complain to Wacom and TVP, they would have a better understanding of the needs of a working professional, and they would improve their product to help make your life a little easier. I figure that the developer or designer can't test under the same working conditions as the end user. If they could, they wouldn't be developers or designers, they'd be animators (or something else).

Wacom has time constraints, manufacturing constraints, and cost constraints. I'm sure they're doing the best they can with what they've got. They still try to make the next version a little better than the last though. While the mighty development team at TVP has made the perfect product for you, and have no personal need for money, I'm sure they want to keep paying Elodie without depleting their massive fortunes. Unfortunately, that means they have to keep selling their product, and the business model of the software world always seems to include new versions and upgrades and all that. Fortunately, there are some people who appreciate slightly different things than you. If the idea adds a small feature that makes a few people just a little happier, and the development of it isn't too bad, then why not do it? Then, when people are looking at the new version feature list, they can have maybe one or two things that matter to them out of the 93 that might not.

Seems that when you make something easier for a small segment of the population, it's often advantageous for everyone-but maybe in different ways than intended (curb cuts come to mind). I guess I've said enough about all of this. The original thread went sort of far off course, didn't it? sorry about that.

[Fabrice]

While the mighty development team at TVP has made the perfect product for you, and have no personal need for money, I'm sure they want to keep paying Elodie without depleting their massive fortunes

We are not that rich !! You seem to have a confuse idea of what is TVPaint, and its team ...

I'm not allowed to give the monthly income of all people here (and I do not want the other companies to have such informations), but I just want to say we are actually more involved into TVPaint because of the users and the interest of the job (and of course "2D animation" in itself) rather than for the money.

It's every year the same dilemma between :
* getting a bigger salary,
* hire a new people to improve the development (softwares) or the commercial aspect of the company (website, tutorials, etc ...).
* trying to visit new countries to find some potential new customers ...
* buying some new materials like cameras, etc ...

Fortunalety, it's a pretty interesting challenge !

If the idea adds a small feature that makes a few people just a little happier, and the development of it isn't too bad, then why not do it? Then, when people are looking at the new version feature list, they can have maybe one or two things that matter to them out of the 93 that might not.

I think we are already working in that way ... (out-of-pegs, smooth of the lines, ... ) are you really reading the forum ?

[malcooning]

User 767,
I think you got the wrong idea about several things up there.

1. TVP is a small team centered around it's user needs.
2. TVP is the app that adds the most new features in it's free updates than any other applications I'm aware of.
3. These additions are, by large, features requested by users (as well as bugs found by them)
4. Paul is far from suffering. I believe you can easily quote him happy. (Eastern-European sour nature is a different matter, on the other hand)
5. No one is trying to intercept your Sub-frame sound request. You can rest assure that this request has been noted and taken into consideration by TVP team. But in the meantime, if people are suggesting workarounds, it's because it's helpful.
6. You might have failed to notice, but by rousing some reactions on this thread you've drawn attention to it, and therefore to your sound feature request. Not a bad way to bring a request to the developers' attention, if you ask me