Moho Animation Forum

Well most of them anyway. Picked up ASP6 a couple weeks ago and have gone through the starting tutorials and most of the online ones I have found both in this forum and on the official site. I'm probably completely missing something somewhere (i.e. skimmed over the requisite material) but I'm pretty sure I've been thorough. Well I've been working on learning this prog for probably a total of 60ish hours over the last two weeks, a good chunk of time for a casual beginner, so rest assured I'm trying my hardest to keep the stupid questions to a minimum.

ANYWHO!

Topic #1:

Exporting. This I'm having trouble understanding. I see that I can export to AVI. That part I understand. As far as the rest of the jargon that pops up when I try exporting I'm completely lost. I tried googling this stuff but the more I read on WHAT the compression numbers and all that jazz actually means it just made my head hurt. A simple answer is all I'm looking for. When I'm done with my animation... what do I do to get it into a viewable movie in the best possible resolution I can. Maybe I'm missing something. I just want a clear HD picture.

I also figured that ASP is probably not too handy on making extensive movies, especially after searching these forums and reading some of the posts here. So my thought was to just cut everything into a variety of scenes and then use Windows Movie Maker to jam it all together. Is this a good way to go about it? Especially if I want to keep a HD resolution (or at least near HD).

Topic #2

NEVERMIND! After screwing around with the forums and google I discovered a new term, walk cycle. About 5 minutes of googling turned up this video: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-yxxGDJ ... animation/ which answered my question on repetitive movements. Instead I pose this question: wth are these "actions" I keep reading in posts throughout this forum. I'm assuming this is a saved movement or something? Still catching up on the lingo.

P.S. when I try to export AVI, DivX will play the scene once then fail to play it again. Quoting a compression error. I'm guessing this will be answered with Topic #1 but figured I'd just throw that out there.

THANKS!

Hello XFracture

About exporting and compression, to compress you need a codec, that's a piece of software that compresses video or audio, examples are XvId for avi or Animation for Quicktime.

Personally I export as PNG's or Quicktime with Animation codec.

You always create a scene at a time, no matter what software, then you compose in a video montage tool like Premiere or one of the free ones.

To do that it is best to export as image sequences with no compression then do a montage, where you then compress to a more manageable video size.

As for walk cycles, use actions.

Actions are like buckets where you create a reusable piece of animation you can use over and over in AS Pro, look them further.

Hope this helps a bit.

G

Now that I know what posters mean by "actions" I can figure out how to do them. I just needed to know what exactly they were referring to. I'm still a bit confused as to what you mean about the exporting. Are you suggesting to export them frame by frame and then use XvId (or the program called Animation) to then render all the frames together into an actual video clip. And then use a movie program to make the clips into one video?

I just wanna clarify so I'm not confused by how the process works.

XVid and Animation are codecs, like I said, those are little piece of software that allows softwares like Anime Studio Pro to compress video.

If you just want to export your animations to be seen on the web, you could export to avi, in the avi settings you can choose xvid for codec, which compresses video alot while retainning good quality. You need to download the xvid codec to be available is AS Pro.

You could also export to Quicktime, and in the settings you could choose Animation as a codec, which produces larger videos but with very good, close to lossless video, or you could use h-264 codec, which produces much smaller files, while retainning good overall quality.

Those codecs are found in the settins of the export in Anime Studio.

G

To get HD using Windows Movie maker you will have to use vista or download a HD script for XP. I almost always yous AVI uncompressed and then Use WMM to splice the scenes together. I get 720p HD with this format.

I know uncompressed AVI uses a lot of space but I usually delete the AVIs after the editing is done. I just keep the original AS projects.

If you're just getting started with Anime Studio, you don't need to master everything all at once. I would just familiarize yourself with what the program can do, but then focus on mastering the features you actually intend to use right away. This depends on what you're trying to animate.

For example, I went for several months-a year without learning how to use actions. Actions are useful if you plan to really develop a particular character and save movements such as walking, blinking, etc which the character may do repetitively.

But when I first started using Anime Studio, I didn't have a particular character in mind and particular movements I wanted to save. I was more or less experimenting with bones, point motion, and onion skins. I also bought "The Animator's Survival Kit" to study up on how animators get the movements to look right. I didn't need to learn actions until I decided to do an actual project. But if I had happened to make a really great walk cycle, I could have turned it into an action after the fact.

On the other hand, you might already have a project and characters in mind, and want to start right off the bat making your own custom mouth and creating actions for the blinks, etc.

There are lossless codecs available for free out there on the web -- they won't reduce your file sizes like xvid, but they do cut the size of your file down to 1/2 or 1/4 the original size without loss of image quality. I have a windows machine and I personally use the Lagarith codec, which can be had at
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

If interested, get the installer and run it (you may need to restart your computer). Then the next time you export an animation, select that codec to save as.

Also note that I am using this as an intermediate step. I usually convert my final animations to WMV format for uploading to the web.

Erik