This my first attempt at an animation. A 9 minute high contrast, high saturation animation with classical music to captivate the attention of my child.
It is aimed at young infant babies. 0-6 months old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-cMO3AVzq0
The process was a pretty huge learning curve for me and I encountered lots of crashes, corrupted files and glitches in renders along the way.
This upload still has some problems, but it got to the point that I thought I’d finish with it and start something new with what I’ve learnt.
In case someone is wondering, things I found useful and will do for next time.
- Lots of “save as” with a new name almost every edit and before pressing the play button. -v001.sif , -v002.sif …
- Save files as “.sif” so I can edit pathnames with a text editor.
- Created multiple sif files and imported them into my animations.
- Create animation movement with generic geometric shape (square box) into grouped layer and have movement bound to the group, not the shape.
When done, import the animation character sif file and place into that group/layer. - I rendered my animations as png files and then rendered them into an animation with ffmpeg.
I had lots of glitches and crashes when trying to render directly from synfigstudio and it was hard to fix glitches when rendering to a video format. - I used synfig cli to render my animation instead of synfigstudio. (as png’s)
- I used a script to break the render up into parts rendering simultaneously to maximise my cpu’s.
- I needed to edit the sif file as it did not read the file paths the same as synfigstudio
- synfig cli needed the embedded images in same folder as the main sif file (not the imported file folders)
- I re-rendered glitches when I found them, but only a few frames before and after.
- I would plan my next animation not to include a big sequence of images that lasts the whole duration of the animation.
The clouds in my animation made it very hard to break up into smaller sections and files.
OS: Fedora release 30 (Thirty)
Software:
- synfig 1.2.2
- synfig-1.2.2-4.fc30.x86_64
- synfigstudio-1.2.2-3.fc30.x86_64
- ffmpeg : 4.1.3
- inkscape-0.92.4-5.fc30.x86_64
