Smooth Animation Advice

chuusagi-n wrote on 5/4/2017, 12:48 PM

Hi!

So recently I've gotten into animating with Vegas. I can do simple head bobs and frame by frame things but I really want to figure out how to make animations smooth like this and .

I'm not sure if I should tween in Pan/Crop or if I should mask? I tried and semi-succeeded with Pan/Crop and saving chunks of the character's hair in pieces, moving them individually, but still it doesn't feel as smooth.

Any advice, tutorials, etc, would be great! I've only been using Vegas for about a year and while I've learned a lot on my own, there's nothing like a little bit of peer advice to help you out..

Comments

JackW wrote on 5/4/2017, 2:03 PM

Vegas isn't an animation program, so you're trying to sail into the wind by using it for your project.

That said, you can probably get smoother results using Track Motion and key frames than using Pan/Crop, putting each element of your animation on a separate track and moving them with key frames.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/4/2017, 8:12 PM

Just like all animations (hand drawn, cg, etc) more frames a second = smoother animation. Just increase your frames and you'll be smoother.

For what you are using as an example I think track motion is a better idea too.

chuusagi-n wrote on 5/5/2017, 2:13 PM

Thank you both for your suggestions! I'll look up some tutorials for track motion.

Is there anything specific I should know about doing track motion? It sounds tricky.

JackW wrote on 5/5/2017, 2:27 PM

It isn't all that tricky. There are several good tutorials on YouTube. Look up "Using track motion in Sony Vegas" and you'll find them. Basically Track Motion allows you to move bits of video around within the image frame -- think Picture-in-Picture -- and to control the duration and direction of the movement using key frames. Come back to us on the Forum if you get stuck.

Red Prince wrote on 5/8/2017, 9:08 PM

The reason those animations are smooth is that they use motion blur. Personally, if I need motion blur (it’s not always worth the extra effort, but sometimes it is needed), I do it in ImageMagick before importing the images to Vegas. But you could try producing your images at a higher rate (say, 120 fps) and import that to a project that uses a smaller rate (e.g., 24 fps). I haven’t tried it that way, but, in theory, Vegas might combine every five images into one frame, and that may look smoother.

It’s certainly worth trying.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/9/2017, 6:36 AM

I'm not seeing motion blur on those videos.