Timing
Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger
Timing
I wonder if anyone has any advice on timing an animation in Anime. If you were to import, for example a live action sequence and wanted the animation to go smoothly with that, do you just visually animate around the live action? Or is there a 'correct' way to do this? I know animatics and exposure/dope sheets are part of traditional methods used for timing. Does the same apply in this instance? Or can I 'cheat' and skip these processes?
Re: Timing
Well, I'll take a stab at this.Viv wrote:I wonder if anyone has any advice on timing an animation in Anime. If you were to import, for example a live action sequence and wanted the animation to go smoothly with that, do you just visually animate around the live action? Or is there a 'correct' way to do this? I know animatics and exposure/dope sheets are part of traditional methods used for timing. Does the same apply in this instance? Or can I 'cheat' and skip these processes?
It's a bit hard to be sure what you're asking, because the way you've phrased it is pretty vague.
Apparently you want to "animate around that" -- ie, do a Roger Rabbit thing matching live action and animation. I figure there's greater than a 90% chance that the live action in question is coming in as DV video.
OK, then, 15 frames per second for your animation rate is perfectly compatible with NTSC video. (This is the default rate for output from a human animation application like iClone, by the way.) 15 frames per second is plenty fast enough to give you seamless movement--but whether you succeed in using that is not dependent upon the frame rate, but rather your skill.
Take your source footage and discard every other frame, so your source video is running at 15fps. I'm not going to go into how to the various ways to do that--but you might note that there are mini-applications dedicated to such a task, such as Motion Perfect.
What you want to do now is think about the extremes of the live actor and the extremes of the animated figure (whether it's a character or some graphic abstraction). Shuffle through your live action frames to find the key poses that you wish to "animate around."
(Or, if you didn't film a person but just panned the camera around, find the frames where the camera sets on the marks for your animated figure.)
There's your timing. Your figure now has to act its way from one key frame to the next to the next.
There are plenty of folks in the forum that are brighter than I am, so if you need more help, clarify further and you'll get the answer.