[Bob Delbridge]

I have attempted to load an Mp3 successfully BUT it only puts a 1000 frame section on to it. I have tried to set up a new scene with 4000 frames but it reverts to 1000. Is this the limitation of the program or of my computer (M1 Mac mini)?

[Niels]

Hi Bob,

You are right! I just tried it my self – and it does revert to 1000 indeed.

It is NOT a limitation of your computer (which is more than capable!) and not a limitation of Animation Paper in reality – just a number-limit we must have put in for some reason in the early development days. 🙂

I must have imagined that you did not want to ever start with more than that many frames, since its better to add them as you go along. But I guess we didn’t anticipate the way we made audio work. So you are right, we need to set the limit higher.

For Alpha 4 we will increase it to 10.000 frames. Thanks for making me aware of this funny arbitrary limit!

But what you do right now (with your current alpha version) to get to 4000 frames I don’t see a super obvious solution to I’m afraid.  Fastest way to get to 4000 is to do your initial 1000 and then just hold your ‘ key (shortcut for Add Clone Drawing) for as long as it takes to add all of them.

I do not recommend trying to copy and paste 4 times after selecting all 1000. Just tried it, and it will take for ever. For some reason AP seems to be quite slow when copying just clones, that potentially aught to be very fast, like when simply adding them. Anyway, one more thing for me to look into. Thank you!

Best,
Niels

[Bob Delbridge]

Hi Niels  I have managed to create a scene with 5000 frames and attached an Mp3 and it plays it right through to the end. But the visual of the Mp3 stops showing after frame 2147. If I play it through to the end then the visuals appear at the end section but revert to just the first 2147 frames when I play it through again. perhaps this is another number that needs looking at. Thanks for the program and thanks for the help.

Today I have noticed that when I leave animation paper to go to other programs it does not like it and hangs when I return, and I have to force quit.

Bob

[Bob Delbridge]

Hi Niels

My intension is to illustrate in 2D one of my songs from my band. I have loaded Mp3 as mentioned above, but now that I try to add lines to the page it immediately goes to ‘application not responding’ and I have to quit. I shall do some more investigating when I can.

 

Bob

 

[Niels]

Alright – thanks a lot Bob. I am grateful you are finding and reporting these things! It has all been noted, so we can get it fixed. It seems to me that the hanging part is because of certain internal parts are not fast enough when you have 5000 frames – so those parts need to be optimised.

Thank you again!

 

[Niels]

I too tried a lot of frames today. To test it. As you know, we increased the limit to 10.000 frames when doing a New Scene. This resulted in AP hanging for a minute when I made an original drawing somewhere in the middle – or drew a few lines, etc. This is not supposed to be that time-consuming, so we should be able to optimise this a lot. On the other hand, it is not normal to have 5000 frames or more present at once. Normally you would split your music video into clips/scenes, which is much more manageable for a multitude of reasons.

You could start doing an “animatic” (like a storyboard, timed out to your music to give you the overview and impression of how your video is going to be) – this could be done with only 1 or a few frames per second (FPS), because you don’t need higher precision. This way to can plan and edit your whole video with ease using far fewer frames. Then, once that is done, you do one scene (or a sequence of scenes) at a time. Again keeping the number of frames to a manageable number. When all scenes are done you edit them together using any video editor which also gives you access to transitions, wipes, etc. Much better this way.

 

[Bob Delbridge]

Thanks again I was beginning to think along those lines as well.

 

thanks Bob