Syncing voice to lips & exporting as movie

[djswerve]

you;ll never be able to effectively do it like that, it just wont work. Sync'ing manually within flash is specific to your machine (and others similar)only! you change connection speeds and mostly it all goes to ****, and at the end of the day no sound at all is better than crap sound. Flash, good as it is, was definately not made with the aspect of sound in mind, fingers crossed for v.6 (wake up Macromedia!!)(Mods- is there any more info/screen shots of it yet? - mail me please guys)

Aparantely, and i've not tried this, you must load both the movie and the stream off of a command (button, mouse event, etc) then save that clip, on its own and then import this to quick time and save the whole lot as a quick time movie. Load both the clip and the audio in the HTML code at browser/page launch, and quick time SHOULD hit them both off at the same time, lots'a hassle, but if your site revolves around the audio (as mine does) you most certainly have to go beyond flash. I would be looking at actionscript for the flash part as well, read the 'creating sound controls' section in the Actionscript reference (help menu) this will do the same thing but with more control options coming off of it.
Also try Actionscript.com, its a little bare tho.
Someone said about using Director - i've never tried it but i've seen some good sites done in it..
good luck, if you get it working drop me an email - im quite interested in this..
peace out man
swerve

[SwishY]

Originally posted by djswerve
wake up Macromedia !!

I second that !!! And the thing that really upsets me is that Macromedia has the nerve to charge us $300.00 for this slop, and it can't even do something as basic as syncing sound to pictures. It's the equivlent of the old 1900 "silent movies" only for the web

[JohnnySix]

There are many people that have pulled it off, I'm using flash 4 for all my work, I'm not sure if anything new happens in flash 5 with sound that makes sound/motion syncronisation easier, but I've almost got it.
There are many sites out there that seem to have it to a tee, Campchaos.com have voice-heavy films, that rely on the sound-track following the motion, and they have to cater for all speeds..

As for flash 6, that's a long way off yet, DJSwerve, they were spoofs after all, good spoofs, but spoofs none the less, but keep up the protest, and one day you may have your wishes granted. If the voices are loud enough, even the loftiest of Macromedia bods will hear them!!

Cheers!

John

[djswerve]

Originally posted by ThundaChunk Campchaos.com have voice-heavy films, that rely on the sound-track following the motion, and they have to cater for all speeds..
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and your telling me that was done soley in flash?

as i said why beat your head up about trying to make it in flash when ppl make 3rd software designed just for that

on the other comment:
i would protest about it to Mmedia but at the end of the day they havent ignored it cos they dont know about it, they just dont give a toss for it, however sound is now a key factor is many sites - they'd be disparingly ignorant to not incorporate it in flash 6 (if there ever will be uch a thing?)

[desiderata76]

Wow! Thanks guys for all of your replies!! I'm in Australia, so after I went to bed at 4am (legacy of a Flash operator trying to suss it out!!), all you guys on the other side of the world have been busy!

Well, I went away and tried breaking up my sound, and this worked. (for those who aren't sure what this means, I will explain) Basically, I opened my wav of speaking in Sound Recorder, (probably better in a proper sound editor but oh well) and cut the wav up into lots of little wavs, labelling them when saving so I knew what the heck they all were. In my main scene, I had the entire wav inserted on one layer. I then created a new layer and inserted each little wav into that layer, providing each one with a keyframe. I used the complete wav as a guide to match up the short wavs and get them into the exact position. Once this was done, I deleted the "entire wav" layer.

I experimented with all the different sync settings on the layers, and hey presto! the one that worked was: event. Each keyframe of the small wavs was set at event AND the keyframe of the lips (or animation). Please note, that this only worked when I broke up my larger wav of speaking. The other option as has been mentioned, is to have the whole speaking wav on stream. This was nowhere near as good though in my case.

I AM still faced with two problems: the first is that the other syncing I have is to music. Yep, that's right, I have tried to get my character to sing. (yes I know NOW that this is probably really silly in Flash... lol) I'm going to keep trying the same principle, but so far have found problems, coz of course there are no silences in between sentences in a song! (the silences in the speaking wav made it possible to cut it up easily) I'll try and do it in Sound Forge or Gold Wave to get a bit more control over it.... and I'll let you all know if it works.

Of course the second problem, which you've all been discussing (and which I'm freaking out about!!) is that I won't be able to check it on another computer till tomorrow at college. Therefore, I'll probably run into probs with the difference of processors!!! Oh, the joys of Flash.

djswerve, you mentioned using other programs to improve on the Flash animation... I'm really interested in trying this to make my animation work. A bit ahead of my time at the mo though. I've been printing out all these posts, so that when I get a bit more adept, I can go back and give some of these things a try!

In the meantime, I'll check out these links everyone has put up.

By the way, I'm really disappointed that there doesn't seem to be an answer to syncing to long sounds like music which are hard to break up. I guess we should all feel privileged to see Flash in its' early days... we'll look back in a couple of years time and laugh and say, (in an old scratchy voice): "when I was using Flash 4/5, it was so much more difficult... not like you youngies have the luxury of today with Flash 21.0!"

[desiderata76]

Hey Danny!
I checked out your updated web page... gee that's heaps better!! The way you've synced the music and drum beat to each part of the animation is great! Just out of curiosity, when you play it back on your computer, are you getting a very slight lag around the bit the web address comes up on the screen? I found that the www came up beautifully, but then the rest of the address was a bit out. I'm just curious to see if this is something you're still working on, or if it's a case of what everyone's been discussing with the different computer issues?
Really cool site though!

[JohnnySix]

(desiderata76 said this: )
By the way, I'm really disappointed that there doesn't seem to be an answer to syncing to long sounds like music which are hard to break up. I guess we should all feel privileged to see Flash in its' early days... we'll look back in a couple of years time and laugh and say, (in an old scratchy voice): "when I was using Flash 4/5, it was so much more difficult... not like you youngies have the luxury of today with Flash 21.0!"

*lmao* You're right man, maybe with version 21.0+, we'll simply plug a socket into our eyeball/ear/spine socket and record our thoughts directly into an swf!! Now that would rock! But then we'd have to find something else to gripe about!!

DJSWERVE.. At the moment, I don't know of any 3rd party software that can produce the sound any different from flash 4/5 in an swf that'll be recognised by the current browser plug-in, but if you find one, I'd love to know, since most of my up and comming stuff requires lip-syncing, apart from the robot stuff.


Cheers!!

John

[Edited by ThunDAcHUnK on 01-20-2001 at 09:10 PM]

[djswerve]

i would have edited my comment but i reckon this a new one anyway...

Thunderchunk, please... did you read my comment? you dont know what you're talking about man!! for a start you cannot be sure unless you vary your connection speeds.. which unless you have 2 or more pcs, or an ISDN line is pretty impossible - and im telling you - you're wrong man, i didnt actually go to that site i just commented on what you said, but now i've been, i've gotta say that is the badest sync i've heard on a finished site! It is so bad that the aduio voice is nearly finished before the guy begins to move his mouth. I stand by swishY here, sync'ing in flash cannot be done. I have the pleasure of a beaffed up pc at work - fast as ____- it is, on site server, lightspeed connection, major Mhrtz and all that, and on the other hand my dads pc which im on now, is pants, slower than the slowest of slow. thats how i can differ speeds and it really comes in handy when testing your site,i.e. - if it loads on my old man's machine, im sorted, lol, but it depends what audience you are targetting, if they've got powerful machines and you know they have it doesnt really matter but the chances favour otherwise usually

ever used director? ive heard sketchy commentts about it, i know nothing tho? you?

[JohnnySix]

I too have the benefit of both a fast connection, and a slow one, well 56k...

The college server can pull down most of the animations on my site in under a minuite, sometimes a few seconds, depending on size, though I'vs found the lip sync to work pretty much the same on both.

To be honest, it comes down to whether you're a perfectionist or not, if I was, I'd never have the thing up.

Ah well...

Cheers

John

[JohnnySix]

I've not tried director yet, it's something that's beyond my means at the moment, I'm going one package at a time. The college doesn't have it either. So, in a word, no, I've not seen anything of it, other than screen shots. Sorry.

[desiderata76]

Hi there again,
Hey I was just wondering if you can tell me how to put my animation on a web address?? Believe it or not, I'm learning Flash, but don't know anything about websites...lmao. We're learning that in a couple of months!
Is it easy? or too involved to explain here? If so, don't worry about it.. just curious to see how my animation runs through other pcs and of course what you think of it!

[Danny Tuppeny]

Originally posted by CoolMoves

Originally posted by Danny Tuppeny
I cut out the preloader... ACE! It streams perfect for me on a 56k modem, so the preloader just caused waiting for no reason!

I am also on a 56K and you might want to add that preloader back in It was as choppy as onion soup...

If you are trying to sync it did not work from what I saw.

Chrisw said the same, but it worked great for me and all my mates, hust you two...

I'm gonna put some low-byte stuff in at the beginning, so it can load quite a bit while it shows the little frames...

As for syncing, it syncs fine everywhere else, it's prolly just cos it couldn't load fast enough... I'll let you know when I've altered it...

Danny