Animation Screen Test
Now that I have begun the animation phase of my cartoon, I want to see how the finished product will look on a TV. When animating, you can export your finished product to many different formats such as the internet, DVD, CD-ROM, video games etc. My finished product will be on a DVD for viewing on a television set. Therefore, I want to make sure I have all of my animation settings set correctly, and I want to make sure I have a clear understanding of the process. I will need to animate my cartoon in a program called Moho, then export to a movie editing program (I am using Apples iMovie). Add in sound effects and music, title slides, trim and edit the video footage, and organize the scenes. I will then have to export the video project to a DVD authoring tool. I am using Apple's iDVD, because of its simple interface.
So, in order to test my animation process, I decided to make a DVD of one of my scenes and watch it on TV. If everything looks OK, I will continue animating, and add more detail to the scenes.
These are the steps it took to go from Moho to DVD:
- First of all I had to render the animation. Rendering will take all of the information that I supplied to Moho and use it to create either a sequence of pictures or a digital video file. Some people prefer to export a sequence of still images that they compile together in their video editor. However, for me I prefer to export as digital video. Apple's iMovie will import a digital video file directly, so that makes the most sence for me. If you were using a high end animation program such as Maya or 3DS Max you may want to export as still frames. The reason for this is that render times from these programs can take hours or even days! If your computer crashed during a render, you would have to start all over again, if, your output file was video. However, if you are outputting still frames, you would only have to restart the render at the last good still frame. In Moho, my render times are only about 1-2 minutes or sometimes less, so my output file type is not as important.
A few words on resolution.
- I use a screen resolution of 640 x 480. This has always worked ok for me. I am in the United tates, and here we use NTSC video format. If you live in another country you may use the PAL standard, which may change these settings. The whole point of a screen test is that if you made a mistake, you will catch it here. If you are working on a PC system, you will have to see what video formats your editor will import. Quicktime is an Apple format, although it will work on both Mac and PC platforms as long as you have the Quicktime player. Windows commonly uses AVI format. If you export as still images any video editor should be able to import them.
- If you film video in NTSC format, you are capturing 30 FPS (frames per second). I animate at 30 frames per second, but not everybody does. Some people will work at 24 FPS or 20 FPS and web animation is often as low as 12 FPS. iMovie gives you a time stamp in minutes.seconds.frames. For example, your time code might read 1.30.14. This mean you have 1 minute, 30 seconds and 14 frames. At 30 frames you would have another second, so after 1.30.29 your time code would change to 1.31.00. Make sence? This confused me at first but it makes perfect sence now. Just remember that 0 counts as the first second (in iMovie anyway).
Here is a screen shot of iMovie. *Note the time code under the picture of "Bubbles".
- In the video editor I add in any sounds or music I may want. You can also add your voice over. To make alignment of the voice over easier I imported the voices into Moho. However Moho only has limited support for sound as it is an animation program and sound editing is better suited for a video editor.
- Once I was satisfied with my video I exported to iDVD. iDVD is Apple's DVD authoring program. It allows you to create chapters and add an intro slide/title screen. I burn the DVD in iDVD then take a look at the product on the TV. I will listen to the audio for quality and examine the picture and resolution for any flaws. I will also take a look at my characters movements to see how I might improve them.
