Importing audio

[Jkoseattle]

I am confused about how to import an audio file into my Moho Debut project. I added an Audio Layer, and it prompted me for a file,; I chose the WAV file. An audio wave was displayed in the timeline. However, not only will it not play back, now the movie itself doesn't play, it just sits at Frame 0, though transport buttons enable and disable as if it thinks it's playing. If I remove the audio layer from the project, it again plays back fine (but of course now with no audio!).

What I find most perplexing is that I can't find any documentation on importing audio and using it in Moho. I saw something about some sort of audio recorder, but I want to use an existing audio file, and design my animation to fit. It's a music video. Don't lots and lots of people use Moho to make animated music videos where the music track comes first? It seemed to me that this would be something obvious that everyone would need to do, so I'm completely confused that I can't find anything. I feel like I'm missing something stupidly obvious here. Help!

[obtusity]

Not my area of speciality, but some guessing from things I have read:

I suspect part of the problem is that WAV is just a container that can contain many different types of audio data encoding (floating point, 8/16/24/32-bit, signed and unsigned) and Moho may not necessarily handle them all.

One tip I've seen is to open the WAV file in Audacity, then save it out again with the default settings (16-bit PCM, I think) which is more likely to be compatible. Use this new saved file with Moho, but it might potentially involve a loss of audio quality (not necessarily obvious), so you might want to keep your original sound file and re-combine it with the animation in a good video editor that can handle more audio encoding formats.

[hayasidist]

You're on Debut?? Have you reached the limit of tracks that you can have?

To do what you want it's probably best to use Moho as an animation program and not as the engine to create the final assembled film - a compositor works best for this. The audio track in Moho is only used for sync purposes and can be reduced to just a series of clicks for each hit point (maybe every bar beat, plus significant other events). It sounds as though you're doing something with video too - overlaying animation? adding effects? -- whatever- it may be feasible to do effects that are syncd only to video in a separate pass (IOW the video has its own visual hit points - you don't, as such, need the audio hit point because the video has this -- e.g. an on-screen cymbal crash is visually evident and doesn't need an audio hit point -- but an off-screen crash does need a cue -- this could be a flash mark in a video that you build for the purposes of synchronisation or an audio cue). This process: creation of sync tracks (audio and/or video), animation, and subsequent assembly in a compositor is what many people who do animation to (pre-existing) video / music do. Exactly how you separate things will depend on what you need to achieve...

[Jkoseattle]

FYI: I learned from tech support that my audio file is longer than the maximum length supported by Debut. \

I've stated this in other threads, but I think that SM's chosen restrictions for Debut are much too severe. It was my fault I guess that I didn't look more closely at what I couldn't do with Debut, but limiting to about 2 minutes is the last straw. I'm probably going to bite the bullet and upgrade to a usable version, but SM should know it's been a really bad experience for me and I'm feeling much more like I got a little scammed than having had a good enough user experience to upgrade with enthusiasm. Sure' they'll get my money, but they won't have won me over.

[Greenlaw]

Two minutes is a extraordinarily long time for a single animated scene. Is this one scene or a edit of many scenes?

I've been working in the industry for a long time and it's been rare to animate a scene that runs longer than 5 - 10 seconds. (Most scenes are shorter.) Typically, your scene files should have only the audio required for timing and lip syncing. After you render out your scenes, the individual scenes (image sequences or movie files) are assembled in a video editing program, where the final audio tracks are mixed.

(BTW, I normally render out layer comps for compositing in AE or Fusion but that can optional. The composited animations themselves, whether from Moho or a compositing program, are typically assembled in a video editor for final output.)

Technically, you could assemble your rendered scenes in Moho but the program really isn't designed for that, and I guess with Debut you'll still hit that 2 min wall with the audio track. Even without the audio limit, it could get awkward even with the Pro version.

Whether using Debut or Pro, I would suggest assembling your production in an video editor instead. There are many inexpensive editor available and a few free/open source ones too.

[Jkoseattle]

I see, that makes sense, I should have thought of that. So the common usage pattern is that each shot is a separate project in Moho? So I could use Camtasia or Adobe Premiere to edit animations together that are much shorter. I don't think any individual shots are going to be much longer than 5-10 seconds. Yeah, I can do that, thanks for the clarification. So maybe I still can use Debut after all....

[Greenlaw]

Yes, that's it!

You should think of the individual Moho scenes/renders in the same way as individual video clips on a timeline in Premiere.

I've only used Camtasia for editing screencasts but if it can import video from other sources, I think it should work fine.

But if you have Premiere, I think that might give you more editorial and media flexibility. My personal preference is Vegas but in practice I think any of these should work fine.