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Using Vegas For Animation – Lip Sync Question
I’m creating an animated short in Vegas using South Park style “cut out” animation. The actual animating has been pretty easy (using track motion, parent/child compositing, etc). I could do this all in After Effects, but frankly this method is faster for me and looks just as good.
Anyway, the one bridge I can’t seem to cross efficiently is animating lip synch. I need to show phonemes — the different mouth shapes for each kind of sound in a word. So “boat” has three shapes, the “b”, “oh”, and “t” shapes. I have to cut between these shapes rapid-fire so that it can sync with the dialogue.
Right now I’m just pulling in the various mouth shapes (image files) into the timeline and sliding them into the right spot. But…dozens of mouth shapes in a few seconds of dialogue. So this is time consuming at best.
I’m wondering if you guys can brainstorm with me on a more efficient way to handle this. In a perfect world I could play back the audio track at, say, half-speed and simply hit a number key that corresponds to the appropriate image. Then it would be dropped onto the timeline at the cursor. That way I could quickly “type” in the lip synch as I listened.
Now this sounds like something I can rig up with multi-camera editing. If I put each mouth shape image on it’s own track, I can quickly cut between them. But I still have a problem: Can I slow down playback so that I can keep up as I furiously switch between tracks?
Of course I’m also open to any alternatives.
Thanks in advance!
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6 Replies
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I just saw an interview with Parker and Stone in Wired Magazine where they described how they created South Park characters with construction paper, and that they still do it this way.
I’ve never done it, but here’s how I would approach it:
For each phoneme, play the timeline and hit the “M” key when the “Oh” (for example) should appear. Then slide an “oh” frame to the marker. Clear the markers and do it again for the next phoneme.
When done, stretch the phoneme frames on the timeline to fill in the blank spaces.
I would really like to see your finished project, and to know how you did it.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
[Cuitla Huezo] “Can I slow down playback so that I can keep up as I furiously switch between tracks?”
Try using velocity envelopes.
Get Vegas set up for multicam.
Add one more video track and put anything on it (generated media, color bars, etc.) and make it the same length as your audio track.
Group these two together.
Insert a velocity envelope on the extra video track and set it to 50%.
Insert velocity envelopes on the mouth shape tracks and do the same thing.
You can go lower than 50% if you want to as long as it’s still intelligible.
Just make sure to set all your envelopes to the same speed. -
Brilliant, Mike! The velocity envelopes. That’s the connection I wasn’t making on my own.
Thanks to you and Stephen for the interest. I’ll try to update with some project footage when I can. This forum is the best!
-Cuitla
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You can also set the overall preview playback speed to something lower than 1 (normal rate), by dragging the little orange triangle under the Rate slider next to the transport controls. Right-click on the triangle and you can select 0.5x or 0.25x normal rate. Hold Ctrl and drag for fine adjustment. I’m using Movie Studio so the layout might be different in Pro.
After setting the speed, hit space/play as normal, and the playback will be slower, although the audio will be a lot lower in pitch so it might be difficult to make out the speech.
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Good luck Cuitla.
Looking forward to seeing the final result. -
Here’s a quick proof-of-concept animation I made to test out lip sync:
Thanks again for the tips. Works like a charm.
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