Gary's Anime Studio Experiments

Gary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.

What I learned (Feb 1, 2008)

Well, my first animation is done. I learned a few things along the way. First of all, I learned that working with a number small Anime Studio files is easier than working with one big giant file. I ended up breaking the project into clips that ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. Then I assembled all the pieces in QuickTime Pro. This made the job of animating and lip synching considerably easier.

When breaking up the video into smaller clips, a separate timeline log has to be made for each clip. You will also need to make separate audio files for each clip for input into Papagayo for lip syching.

Another handy tip is to remember that when ever a layer is not visible in the scene, turn off the visibility checkbox in the layer control panel. This helps speed up the render time since Anime Studio will have to render the layer and then decide whether the layer is within the boundries of the visible screen and not hidden behind other layers.

YouTube Considerations

Here are some things I did wrong, that I only discovered when I went to upload my completed video to YouTube. The best frame rate for YouTube is 30 frames per second. This is the standard video frame rate. 24 is the standard film frame rate. I did my video at 24 fps. The best render size for YouTube is 640x480. I rendered my video at 320x240. What I did do right is using mp3 encoding for my audio. The other thing to bear in mind when uploading to YouTube is that the video, even a small video, take a very, very long time to upload to YouTube. As much as several hours, so don't get impatient and cancel the upload before it's done.

QuickTime Pitfalls

When slpicing together sections of a movie in QuickTime Pro, the saved movie is not complete. The saved file apparently links to the files for the pieces you edited together, If you try to upload the resulting file to YouTube it will not work correctly. Also, if you try to export the MOV file as any other type of file you must save the output to the desktop. Attempting to save the output to any other folder will result in an error message about a file not found. The best bet seems to be to export the MOV from QuickTime to MP4 format.

The Results

Considering that this was a first try at a reasonably long animation, don't judge my results too harshly. That said, here's what the completed animation looks like on YouTube.

Next Up: Limited Animation - OR - Tricks I Learned From Rocky and Bullwinkle