I’m curious as to what frame rates do any of you animate at? And do you sometimes change it during any piece of work to achieve different moods or feelings?
Is 24 fps the standard?
Cheers,
Vyv
Hi!
Even if you render your final files at 24fps then there is no golden rule that says that you have to animate at 24fps. That is called animating on singles (you put a drawing on every frame) and is usually done during fast camera moves or intense action sequences that have to keep up with the camera move. Basically you can hold on your frames as long as you want. Animating on two’s means that you put down a drawing every two frames with as a result that you get 12fps which is usually a comfortable situation to start from but you can even go to 8fps (on three’s) or even lower if you want a slideshow, lol. In the end I always render everything at least at 24fps.
Greetz!
Ha-ha…slideshows can be useful, but not in this context.
Ok, I think I get it. And I can change this up rather easily by changing the fps in the canvas properties. Will that change on the fly, as they say? I mean can I change that in the middle of a shot if need be, or would I then create two separate canvases with unique fps per canvas?
(Maybe I should get off the forums and just go play with Synfig and figure it out that way 
)
Anyway, thanks for the explanation!
Cheers,
Vyv
Hi!
You don’t actually have to change your fps when rendering. All you have to do is decide whether you will animate on one’s (24fps, one drawing every frame ), two’s (12fps, one drawing every two frames) , three’s (8fps) or fours (6fps). Rendering at 12fps or lower was standard when the internet was slow and there was less bandwith to upload the animation.
Greetz!
strictly speaking, 1’s is where every frame is redrawn - this idea works better if you think of animating in drawn 2d. if you are animating a second of 2d animation on ones, and the framerate is 24 fps then you will make 24 drawings. If you decide to animate on 2’s then for the same animation you will make 12 drawings You could be animating on 1’s for a piece of video that is 30fps, in that case you are makign 30 drawings for a second.
the fact that everyone associates 1 with 24fps is because historically film was projected at 24 fps.
when I was doing more trad animation- one trick would be to animate a scene on 2’s and then if there was a dynamic action (like a punch or a take) then we would switch to 1’s (normally,when animating 2’s my drawings would be odd numbered, addign even numbers when switching to 1’s)
We used the same technique. Reading x-sheets that got changed on the fly soon became a form of art. 
Greetz!
Ok, that makes sense. And I understand how that would work in traditional draw every cel animation. Take two shots of any given cel before moving on to the next one and lather, rinse, repeat.
I guess what I’m now trying to wrap my brain around is how to implement a change from say twos to ones and back in the workflow of Synfig. I have drawn a scene completely in Synfig (a room with a television on a table in it) and I want to have a hand holding a remote come into view and start changing channels. (I’ve sussed out how to make all that happen 
) but let’s say I want to have one of those channels show two ninjas fighting. Fast action, so I would want to animate on ones in that case. Is it just a matter of making any desired action happen in less frames? For example ninja #1 punches ninja #2 in the face. The motion of extending ninja#1’s arm takes 4 frames, whereas if ninja #1 was putting his arm forward to shake ninja #2’s hand that motion of putting his arm out the same distance would take 8 frames and therefore appear slower.
Or am I seriously missing the point of what you guys are trying to tell me…
Cheers,
Vyv
I think that you don’t need to worry about framerates when you’re animating with automatics between (as Synfig, Blender do).
Thinking in two or one (for me) has sense if you are working in handdrawings. But in Synfig you only have to think in keys. If ha between need two or one frame, you only need to move the waypoint or work with cuts waypoint.
So, don’t worry about framerates. Work with 24fps is safe for most purpose (web, TV…).
In my case, I use 24fps for final and 12fps for testing previews.
Thanks all,
I will understand much better now. Thinking in terms of keys and waypoints is what I was leaning towards because of the auto in-between as fenix suggested. (And thank goodness for that as I don’t think I have the patience to hand draw that many images 
)
Cheers,
Vyv
Hi!
Don’t forget the “speed” parameter in the groups parameters panel
Greetz!
I had not noticed that yet. I will go check it out.
There are so many parameter options I can spend days just playing with those and discovering what they do!
Cheers,
Vyv