[Niels]

Hi David,

Thanks for your questions. Here’s my answers…

1. Yes, we are trying to not have a lot of preference settings. So far it has made more sense to have any settings in the menu or directly in the interface if it doesn’t complicate the UI. Actually, in the latest version we have removed the preferences menu item completely. It might come back later if needed though.

2. You guessed it 🙂 This area is for scribbling notes, do charts and not least plan dialogue with phonemes, drawn mouth shapes etc.

3. Yeah, right now it is just filling the frame regardless of how big/small the imported image is. We will implement a way to adjust imported images easily. For now I suggest, you just add more space around your image before importing – then your reference drawing/image will show up smaller.

Let me know if you have further comments or questions!

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, thanks a lot for this valuable information. I’ll speak with the programmers and get back to you!

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks for reporting this Blair.

We will have to investigate this. First of all – what file-format are you trying to import? AP should be able to load mp3 or wav.

Did you get any errors when you installed AP?

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks Abdul!

Yeah, our plan is to do camera movements, including curves editor capabilities (ease in/out). This will come in a future update.

Can I ask you to elaborate more on you lip-syncing comment? What exactly did you have in mind?

Are you aware of the X-sheet “annotations” feature in Animation Paper? This is very useful for planning lip-sync. You have your dialogue sound track loaded, you can see the waveform right there in the X-sheet, and next to it, in the annotations column, you can write out the dialogue downwards across the frames (by scribbling it by hand), include notes, timing charts, phonemes and even draw mouth shapes at the points in time you want them to hit.

Please let me know what you think…

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Emma,

Thanks for your question – you guessed it! The importing-movie-file functionality is not done yet. We plan to support mp4 and maybe other formats. (For clarity, I will mention that exporting of movie files IS implemented and is working well. AP supports mp4 and mov (including alpha channel) formats for exporting.)

For now, you need to save your video as a sequence of numbered png images. Then you can easily import your “video” in one go onto one layer. Just select the first png, hold Shift and select the last.

An alternative method is to save your video as an animated gif (which can also be imported in AP). But of course this can result in a huge gif file and colors might be heavily compressed. So it depends if this is a good option or not. 😉

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, cool. I was going to say that there’s no reason it shouldn’t work with alpha 7. 😉

Thanks for letting me know.

[Niels]

Thanks Ruth, we already have such a reverse function on our todo list. Coming up! 😉

[Niels]

OK, good to know. Thanks Ezekiel!

[Niels]

Thanks for this Ezekiel!

When you say “cut and paste” – do you mean using the lasso?

I suspect both of your issues to be about the lasso. You see, because of our line engine (which is great in so many ways), it has this limitation, that if you “overuse” the lasso – i.e. copies a lot of parts in the same drawing, it will eventually build up the data and therefore slow down the software. I believe you must have gotten a warning about it in AP? As it says in that window, the remedy is to trace over your drawing on a blank sheet and delete the old one.

However, as we speak, we are actually working on a better general solution. Hopefully this will be part of the next update.

Please let me know if it really was the lasso/stamp thing you meant? 😉

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

I don’t think this has anything to do with your Mac. It must be something in the way we encode the video. We’ll investigate further…

Thanks!
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Rebecca,

Thanks for sending your files over. I have tried them on two of our test computers. They work on both without failing the export.

It’s funny though! When I play the resulting mp4 videos they look perfectly fine – however, when I scrub the videos (using the native Quicktime player on Mac) I get glitches similar to the ones you got. And when I play again – the glitches are gone.

Strange.

I’m curious, do you get the same? I mean, when playing the mp4’s they look fine, but the glitches happen when scrubbing?

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

My email is niels at animationpaper.com (writing it cryptically so bots will hopefully not find it – probably will though 😀 Anyway)

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Rosy – 4 minutes between your posts! That was quick 🙂 I’m glad you figured it out. 😉

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Mario,

No problem – PAP is still here. Here’s the download link: https://animationpaper.com/files/pap_v4_0.exe

You can have both installed at the same time. No worries.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Rebecca,

Your post only just now turned up for approval for some weird reason – I see it is many days since you submitted this. I am truly sorry that it took this long. I have no idea what happened.

But to your question! Yeah, as a work-around you could export as mov or a sequence of png’s and use iMovie to convert to mp4 (if that is the format you need it to be in). However, it is of course not meant to do that – it aught to just work without the glitches exporting directly as mp4 from AP. Would you mind sending me your .ap file, so I can try it here and see if I get the same problem? If I do then this will help a lot when we hunt for and fix the issue.

My email is the one you got your activation key from.

Thank you! And once again, very sorry for the delay!
Niels