soundtrack in AS "echoes" words / syllables

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Craigar
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soundtrack in AS "echoes" words / syllables

Post by Craigar »

Hi, my first animation with AS is proceeding nicely - thanks to all the help I'm receiving in this forum.

Issue: My soundtrack in AS sounds bad; it duplicates some words or syllables randomly. Is there a way to make it better?
I'm not using the audio in AS for final output; I'll attach high quality / online audio inside my video editor. Still I'd like a good reference for timing.
I've been using WAV files. I've tried them at high and low quality (eg. 44.1 khz 16 bit and 22 khz at 8 bit ) but it still does that sort of random echo thing.
I'm on a mac.

Thanks,
Craig

ps. I love animating. This is soo cool.
Craigar
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mkelley
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Post by mkelley »

It's not AS -- it's just the playback speed of your computer.

You can "make it better" with a faster computer, or shorter animation (less intensive CPU wise). Scrubbing through the audio will play it fine and that's what's usually done for fine tuning purposes anyway. The more animation you have (more layers, more "stuff" going on) the worse it will get as AS tries to keep up with the playback.

You can try turning on wireframe display (or basically turning down everything as much as possible for speed) as well as hiding things you don't need to see (I'm not sure if this helps or not -- never really tried). But, all in all, AS does the best it can during this kind of preview.
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Craigar
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Post by Craigar »

thanks, mkelley.
I'll give your suggestions a try.

though I'm not sure about:
You can "make it better" with a faster computer
My machine's pretty solid; I use it to edit video professionally.
Craigar
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

I had the same problem on my mac. It's just an issue of overloading AS with too much stuff at the same time. Culprits have been: video layers, and very complex constructions ofg lots of vector layers, plus onion-skin switched on.

Switch off whatever you don't need in a scene, or erase it completely. This should help in nearly all cases. Still I had some two or three scenes where this didn't help. So I animated as good as I could and checked the result in the rendered video. Mind you: the final render has the soundtrack always intact.
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mkelley
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Post by mkelley »

Craigar wrote:thanks, mkelley.
I'll give your suggestions a try.

though I'm not sure about:
You can "make it better" with a faster computer
My machine's pretty solid; I use it to edit video professionally.
That doesn't say much -- now, if you could give me your 3D rendering benchmarks I could tell you how good your machine was. But I can edit professionally even on my laptop (and have -- that was my business for years).

But I do see this the slower the processor I use AS on -- on my laptop it's bad even on small scenes. On my main desktop it almost never happens unless I have a few dozen characters (each with dozens of layers, so we're talking literally hundreds of layers).
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Craigar
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Post by Craigar »

Thanks guys.
ST, yea, I thought it might be a mac thing. I'm going to try your workarounds. Thanks a lot.

MKelley,
Sorry, I could have given you more info.
Craigar
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heyvern
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Post by heyvern »

I hate to say this but AS in general is slower on the Mac.

A while back I had a really really intense bone rig for a face and head (over 300 bones). On my Mac this rig was barely usable. The mac was a 700 mhz Quicksilver model. However I could animate it in real time on Windows. A very ancient slow PC with only about 600 mg ram and a 1.3 ghz processor.

I was very excited when I had an opportunity to try this rig on a state of the art Mac at the time (this was probably one or two years ago) but sill more than twice as fast as the mac it was developed on. I expected it to work as fast as the PC or at least close to it.

It was almost as slow as my Mac that only had half the speed. For some reason there was very little performance improvement.

I don't know why for sure but I think in general AS does not perform as fast on the Mac as it does on PCs. It doesn't stop me though. I now have a "newer" PC with much more power and a lot of what I do runs in "real time" for playback... but I still find myself using the Mac version more than the PC version for some strange reason... I just like macs more I guess. ;)

-vern
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Craigar
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Post by Craigar »

Thanks HV.
Does AS run well on Vista?
I have Vista on my MacBook Pro ( ironic isn't it? ).
Since I may see a performance boost I'm thinking of doing future AS projects on the Vista MacBook, then transferring the files to my G5 tower for video editing.
Any opinions?
All the Best,
Craig
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heyvern
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Post by heyvern »

I use AS on a G4 quicksilver (ancient) and on Win XP on a a slightly oldish (1 or 2 years) Dell (I think it's a couple of ghz but I can't check right now... installing something).

What you describe is what I do sometimes. I love the Mac (even a slow one) and when I'm drawing and creating the speed issue isn't as much of a concern. Plus I have access to all of my other applications. When animating and rendering a "bloated" project I often switch over to the PC. The PC most ABSOLUTELY renders much faster.

You will have to buy a whole new copy of AS for Vista. There is no way to run both with the same serial number... I don't think you can switch over. That is why I snagged both versions when I had the chance... well... I didn't pay for both but they are 100% legal. Got a coupon from efrontier for the Mac version.

So it's easy for me to say "buy both" since I didn't really have to. But I think that is what you would have to do.

I could so easily switch entirely to the PC... it's right next to the mac. I use the same key board and monitor for both... I just... can't... make the transition. It still feels alien to me working on the PC.

I need a therapist. ;)

-vern
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slowtiger
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Post by slowtiger »

The last project I could test this behaviour was a year ago, but it showed that the very same files played faster on a windows PC than on my G5 PPC Mac.

I haven't tested on any recent Mac model, especially not on a Mac with Intel core, but I would expect AS to be as fast as one could wish for.

In any case, real-time playback isn't that important for me. I just need a very good responsiveness while working. The final result I always check with a rendered video file - that's the only safe way to check my timing. This I do with every animation program I use.
chucky
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Post by chucky »

I have a tablet pc running vista, AS works great on it , faster than my desktop with XP even, but there's not so much screen real estate as the dual monitor desktop so I tend to use the desktop whenever I can.
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Craigar
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Post by Craigar »

Awesome, gentlemen. Thanks as always.
I'm going to try AS on my WinVistMacTel (like my new word?) MacBook Pro.
I'll plug one of my desktop monitors into it for more screen space.
If I need to buy a new copy of AS I'll do it (perhaps ebay).
-Craig
Craigar
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