[Niels]

Hi Joanna,

Thanks a lot for your nice words and for teaching using Animation Paper! That’s great. Here’s my answers…

1) Your point is noted. I do follow you. My hesitation is that if I add just a few more tracks, people will ask why the limit? The challenge is to keep AP simple – yet have all the features important to the pro animator. But the more tracks, the more we need other audio functionality as well. But maybe it can be done, keeping everything clean and simple. So I will definitely think more about it! Thank you for letting me know about what you need as a teacher. Appreciated.

2) Yes, as you found out – you can name the layers. 😉

3) Yes, you can use “annotations” to number your frames (as well as write notes to plan your animation, write phonemes or draw mouth shapes or timing charts). Just remember to link your drawings column to the annotations column, so you keep your numbers locked to your drawings.

4) Yes! We have been planning the iPad version all along. It will be done fairly shortly after the final release of the desktop version.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

OK, thanks for clarifying this Juaco! We will look deeper into this matter – and hopefully have it fixed for next release.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi again Blair. We have confirmed this as a problem on our side. Thanks for giving us the heads up! We plan to have it fixed for next release.

Thanks again,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Pharan,

Thank you so much for this. I totally follow.

I agree that your option 3 seems to be the way to go. I like that idea very much. Thank you!

I’ll put it on our todo-list to be done soon.

In the meantime, you could use H (Hand) as the shortcut for dragging the canvas. This works all over the view. Though I do understand the muscle memory thing using the Space bar. 🙂 So we’ll get it updated!

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Wow – that’s a weird thing! Thanks for reporting this, Juaco.

I need a bit more info. What OS are you using? (Windows, Mac or Linux? Which version?) What kind of tablet? (brand, model?)

Does this happen constantly every time you launch Animation Paper?

Turning 180 – so your display image is up side down?

Please get back to me with more info – this makes it easier for us to fix the problem.

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Wow – that’s a weird thing! Thanks for reporting this, Juaco.

I need a bit more info. What OS are you using? (Windows, Mac or Linux? Which version?) What kind of tablet? (brand, model?)

Does this happen constantly every time you launch Animation Paper?

Turning 180 – so your display image is up side down?

Please get back to me with more info – this makes it easier for us to fix the problem.

Thanks,
Niels

[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