[Niels]

Thanks a lot Marc!

Sorry, I’m a bit confused. 🙂 Are you saying that to get the menu items – is just a matter of set up? (I’m on Mac right now and can’t get to a PC – so I can’t test it my self).

I’m delighted to hear, you are loving Animation Paper more and more. Thanks for your kind words.

[Niels]

Thanks Kasey. It is always every 8 frames in Animation Paper (it is not adjustable) – this is my decision because a certain famous hero animator of mine had a rant about this and said it had to be 8 (and not six as I remember Disney did it).

Of course it could be argued that it should be up to the user to set the interval. For good reason. However, I am kind of amazed that, as far as I remember, this really hasn’t been discussed or mentioned by anyone, until you just did it. 🙂 Maybe you were the first to pay attention to these lines. 😉 Anyway, I have made a note of this. We might add this as an option in Settings. Thanks for bringing it up!

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks for asking Kasey.

Frame numbers along the edge of the x-sheet is on our todo-list. It’s planned to be implemented in one of the next updates.

As a help in your current situation: If you hold your cursor over any of the thumbnails in the x-sheet, it will show the frame number as a “tool tip” (a little popup box with the number). Maybe that helps a little?

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

You just export your AP animation as mp4. Go to the menu File > Export > Movie Clip and select mp4.

[Niels]

Hi Landon, thanks for the question!

When the frame number in the top right corner goes red, it means that it is having trouble keeping up the pace. I.e. while it is playing your animation in realtime, it will skip a frame if it can’t keep the overall timing of the animation. If this happens it is indicated by half a second of red number. This way you can always count on the timing and sync with your audio, no matter your hardware and how demanding your scene is.

Skipping a frame is depending on the speed of your hardware, the size of the Animation Paper window, the animation resolution, how many layers, the FPS and so on.

By the way, we are in the process of optimizing the playback algorithms in Animation Paper, so if it is going red with a certain scene and setting now, it might not do it with the next release (the beta). 🙂

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Oh, doh! You wrote the version in the headline! Thanks! We’ll take a good look at this asap!

[Niels]

Are you by any chance using an older Alpha release? We have had these export issues before, but that was (hopefully) fixed. The latest is Alpha 8.1. Please let me know which one you have? (You can check the version in the About window).

If this is an issue in the latest, this will be fixed at top priority – since exporting is super important and something most people are using. Luckily it seems it is working for most people. But I’m super interested to learn if you or anybody else is having this problem with the latest release.

To help you out right away, you are welcome to email your .ap files to me and then I can export them to mov or mp4 and send it back to you. Let’s use wetransfer.com or something similar if the files are large. My email address is the one I sent your activation key from (Sorry, I’m not mentioning it here, because spam bots will sadly pick it up).

Anyway, thanks a lot for posting this. Thanks for your nice words! Please let me know your version.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks for your insight Tammy!

This is a feature that is at the top of our wishlist! We plan to have it included already in the finished 5.0, but if not, then definitely in the free update 5.1.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks a lot for mentioning this Ilias! It would make sense to have a white pen in your situation – I get that.

The only thing I’m worried about with having a preset at the level of what we have now with the black/blue/green/red ones, is that in the default mode of the white background, a user could accidentally change the layer color to white and not be able to understand where his lines went. However, having to change it to white yourself, by using the color wheel (this color wheel will be ready in the very next release BTW) is enough to make sure it is a deliberate thought. Do you see what I mean?

We might at some point consider adding some color presets, so you can quickly change the layer color to any custom color from the speed dial or something…

Anyway, great point. Noted!

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Hi Aeon, sorry for the troubles.

The registration/confirmation emails, must be regarding this website (to go onto this forum), which is different from the activation key registration for your license. I understand having two separate systems are not ideal – later we will have only one.

Anyway, you are doing it correctly by clicking the link in the activation key window. It must have been a temporary thing with our webserver. We have been experiencing some overloading lately. But it is working now, so please just try it again.

Let me know if it works for you or not!

Thanks,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks a lot Devin. Yes, we do plan on releasing the finished 5.0 this year. We will soon be in beta and after that we can finally begin to sell licenses to get some income 😉

Remember that “beta” means all the planned features are implemented, but bugs can still remain and will be fixed. What I mean is that we are not far from feature complete in the latest release. Coloring will come as one of the very first point updates (5.1 or 5.2) after our 5.0 release. These point updates will be free for 5.0 license owners.

[Niels]

Yeah, we have that transform-multiple-frames feature on our todo list already. It will be great and super useful.

[Niels]

There’s not an actual crop tool. But you can crop your whole animation by changing the resolution in Scene Settings.

So, as an example, you have a HD scene (1920×1080) and want to crop off some unused space along the edges, you can type in a lower resolution/size, let’s say 80%, which is 1536×864.

After this operation you can scale right back up to HD, so your output still ends up at 1920×1080, but you keep your cropped framing. I hope this makes sense?

This method of course only works with a centered crop. If you need to crop a smaller part in like one of the corners, you can’t easily do that and you have to move drawings manually.

I am on vacation right now, so I don’t have Animation Paper in front of me, so everything is by memory. 🙂 But I think you can make a scene have many frames from the beginning. So instead of starting with a 1 frame scene, import audio, and then add clones – you can start by making a New Scene, set an approximate number of frames, then import audio, and adjust the number of clones if needed. That must be a much faster workflow.

Let me know if you want me to explain anything better?

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks a lot Devin!

[Niels]

Hi Devin, thanks a lot. I’m delighted you enjoy AP!

Oh, I understand why you are put off by those tags. I’m very sorry. It’s spammers who post bad stuff every day and just as fast I delete it. However I must have missed this tags. I’ll get rid of them now… thanks for letting me know.

Best,
Niels