Sound

To use the Automatic Phoneme breakdown make sure you are using the latest versions of the software 8.5h. Also if your poses are created with a high degree of exaggeration at 100 percent remember to set the default application percent on the pose property page to a more usable value. This value will apply automatically and then if you need the extra emphasis you can tweak the sliders later.

Will

Obviously you need a microphone, a wide diaphragm microphone hooked upped a pre-amp is what's ideally recommended preferably with a foam line disolation booth, but what you have will probably do. You can use either creative wave studio (or whatever the soundcard software is called now) or sound recorder to record raw captures (generally amounts to starting the software, setting up a place to write the file to and make sure to use an uncompressed format, turning on the microphone and hitting the record button and speaking into the microphone), sound recorder has a file size limit of 1 minute on it I think, which probably won't be a big hurdle if you're using amateur voice talent. Because you don't have a pre-amp on the card your raw voice capture files are gonna be nearly inaudible, so you'll need to scale the volume of the wave files somewhere between 400 and 800%, doing this to the sound is gonna cause you to lose nuances but it has the benefit that there will be pretty much no external background noise. Except the hiss from upping the volume, you'll need some other software (if you're interested in it not sounding like it was recorded in the manner in which it will be:), I used Soundforge 4.5 when I was messing around with this stuff though I'm sure there's cheaper alternatives, possibly the creative software has these features. In any case you'll need to run noise reduction filters and probably plosive and sibilant removal filters, though you may be able to avoid the last two if you can impress on your voice talent the importance of turning down their P's B's and S's and not panting into the microphone. Physically write down your dialog in logically small pieces and try to get your friends to practice first, it will help immensely if you can get them to practice recording their voice for a couple of hours by themselves before you do the recording session, so they can at least get a feel for hat they're supposed to be doing or more importantly not doing. You'll probably want to capture small sections like sentences or portions of dialog between commas, have your people do multiple takes experimenting with varied speed, intonation and phrasing, the idea being to assemble actual good takes from the large collection of bad ones, doubtless some people will disagree with this method but the fact is there are voice actors and the rest of us and the rest of us are really bad at voice acting (some people are just amazingly bad!) so you'll need every crutch you can get. Expect to spend a longer than you expect post processing your wave files. Just so you know, by no means am I an expert in this area, but I've had a little bit of experience doing dialog and folly, I hope the info is of some use.

Matt Andersen

Sure.

• sell your soul and get a P3 1200000Ghz system
• failing that, turn off 'skip frames' in the general options. It'll be drawn out, but you'll see every frame, and every fraction of sound belonging to each frame. Plus it sounds cool and scares the dog.
• render quickshaded/wireframe renders, they normally don't take too long to process
• try turning the sounds options up and down in the sound panel. For some reason 22khz is the fastest on my machines, maybe dithering 44khz down any lower then that chews up more cpu than it saves.
• turn off the grid, i was surprised at how much this helped AM
• have only one viewport window open, and make it pretty small
• hide any objects that aren't being used
• use lower quality samples to begin with (cooledit does this easily)
• if using solid shaded view, turn down subdivisions as low as you can stand
• turn off decals

Basically, just try and minimise the amount of work AM has to do on each frame, and it should help playback a lot.

-Matt Estela

This is what I do: If you've moved your camera (you most likely have, the default posistion isn't usually the posistion you want), it creates a choreography action under the camera shortcut. I just drag the sounds down to that action. It works well, since the camera is always there.

CriScO

I was unable to make it work this way at least in v7.1l. However ,what I found did work is, create a null object. create a new action drag the sound on to the new action. (you now have an action that consists entirely of the sound) save the new action in its own file. Right click on the null and import the action. For some reason it doesn't appear to be possible to drag an action onto a null. At least that is what I found out in my test.

If you add the sound into your action window of your scene then the sound will play with your AVI or MOV file. First import the sound, then drag the sound file into the action, whether it be the camera action or character action. And thats it!

-wez

From: willp@hash.com

Drag the sound from the sound folder into your action in the Project Tree.

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