Moho Forum

so ive got the mouth to wav file switch working pretty good but how do i sink too vocies to diffrent heads ie two people in the same frame talking back and forth i see you can only load one sound track??

The soundtrack you load into AS is only used as a background reference -- it actually has nothing at all to do with any animation.

In terms of lip sync you load into the switch track whatever you are using to control the lips, so you can have multiple audio tracks (if you are using the simple audio form of controlling lip sync) and just specify which one you want for which switch layer in the switch layer itself.

so its for ref only?then when i render/export the animation? does it not export the audio too

Depends on how you render. Professionals only render single frames, such as BMPs, which we combine in our editing programs (like Premiere) along with whatever music and other audio tracks we'd like. Exporting as single frames does not export audio.

I can't comment on any other exports since I've never used them.

You can render out of AS with sound. The sound track isn't only for reference. It will render out in QT or AVI.

What is important to understand is that AS does not have ANY audio functionality at all. It only can have ONE audio "track" and that's it. It only starts at the beginning of the animation and it can't be moved to start at a different frame. You can't add separate sound effects or music. All of that must be done in some other audio program and saved as a single WAV file for use in AS.

If you have multiple voices as separate tracks, you can use them to produce the key frames for multiple switch layers as described in the AS tutorials, either using AS or using Papagayo to do lip sync and produce DAT files that imported to switch tracks in AS.

So you use each separate voice track to do this but you need one combined audio track in AS if you want to export the audio from AS.

What Mike is saying is that it is so much better/easier to use another application to do final compositing/editing/sound. AS can export the animation either as QT, or AVI or an image sequence like BMP, PSD, TARGA but you load those animation assets into another program to add dialog, music, sound effects etc.

-vern

Get a sound editing program to edit your tracks. If you're a MAC user, Garage Band will do the job just fine.

When using Windows, I use Guitar Studio. It does a lot more than the name suggests, and it has SMPTE time codes so you can Sync it with your animation.

Here's how I do it (I use MAC these days):

I'll work with a each scene which is usually less than 3 minutes (I combine them later in iMovie). I'll complete the artwork for this scene.

Next I'll edit the voices in the sound editing program. Using SMPTE time codes in AS and in the sound editor, I can line up the sound clips with the actions (I'll have both programs open and tweak the movements in AS and the position of sound clips until the scene gets the flow I like).

Once I got the flow going (my animation at this point looks like an "animatic" or a moving storyboard). I'll render the sound into a WAV, aif, or other AS compatible file.

Now click Animation - Select Soundtrack. Select your audio file.

Next: Lip-sync characters.

Then add other motions to complete the scene.

When I have my scenes completed, I edit them in a movie editor, then load the movie into the sound editor (most sound editor programs let you do this) to add sound fx and music.

There's another thread that has a list of sound editor programs. I think it's in the "Other Software" forum. My favorites are Garage Band for Mac and Cakewalk Guitar Studio for Windows, mostly because they are not very expensive and they have a lot of features that make them suitable for movie editing.