Still having an old issue on latest pencil2D with audio sync

I have Version 0.6.6 and I’m having the same issue thats discussed here : Timeline and Audio syncing issue The last message in the thread says it’s fixed but I’m still running into the issue.

I still have to play from the beginning to get true frame by frame playback. I’m making an animatic and it’s 5+ minutes long so it’s not too bad now but later I’d have to sit through 3-4 minutes just to fix the timing for each beat progression.

If you want to see the problem in action it’s at 5:17:15 ish in this vod : Twitch

This is my first time pretty much using Pencil2D and I really love it. Like, a lot. I love how simple and beginner friendly it is and I’m wishing this is just an issue on my end that I can fix because I really love working with this program and I’m gonna have to spend a lot of time in it.

@corpseil Hi. Unfortunately we’ve found an entirely different picture ever since that thread.

First of there were nasty sound issues that have been fixed one after the other ever since, however similar to other animation software Pencil2D image playback will lag against the sound the more frames and layers you have.

This happens to me with Flash (animate CC), with Toonboom Harmony and even with After Effects. The difference is that other apps have a “preview” feature built-in. Pencil2D currently does not have this, and while it is on the roadmap it will take time to be implemented.

Just as an example I used all three choices I’ve mentioned and I always, always have to pre-render or “cache bake” the playback to play it back as a video, this is basically dumping everything to memory and otherwise I can’t see the real time playback. Flash and AE show frame drops when doing real time playback due to the sheer amount of layers and frames I work with, while Harmony becomes slow as heck with a plethora of deformers, it’s unfortunately normal.

Of course this has nothing to do with having a monster PC or, it’s about a basic impossibility of having dozens of images preloaded in memory along sound without some form of compression.

Video editors do this right, don’t know the technicalities, but my guess is that they do the same as the preview features in other apps, which is to “flatten” or “compress” everything into a playable format to play it back at the target speed. It’s always easier to play a single stream of images and audio than a dozen of them.

Anyway right now the only way to accurately listen to the sound against the image is to use the audio scrubbing feature. When you’re doing lip-sync and looking for the beats this feature is invaluable, other than that accurate real time playback is currently not possible just yet.

Ahh. I see. That is unfortunate. I am very new to animating so I had no idea that this seems to be a common issue amongst programs. I hadn’t thought of it being due to not being able to compress. Pencil2D is the third program I’ve tried animating in. And before I was starting to think maybe it was just my computers fault. Before touching an animation program I was just using a video editor, uploading each frame to it, and adjusting duration.

A possible work around right now, I suppose, is splitting the audio into small parts and animating to those small parts in seprate files and when it’s all done just edit them all together.

But thank you for your response. It has helped a lot!

@corpseil You’re welcome. I personally would like to provide you with a better alternative, but to be honest even professionally this is kind of a pain in the butt. People in the office or a studio just accept that they have to wait a bit to preview, watch the animation unfold and then fix mistakes as seen in the preview.

The video editor or audio scrubbing can help to measure at which frame position does a beat or a letter drops, and with that information you simply go frame by frame doing the drawings.

In traditional animation you do this with what it’s called an “X-sheet”, which is basically a vertical timeline drawn on a piece of paper. People used to (and still do) fill the timing information on it and then used it as a guide to draw the necessary images.

Then this would be taken by a camera man and they would literally take pictures of each drawing and accommodate it on a film strip to respect the frame duration. Vintage stuff obviously :older_adult: :film_strip: :film_projector:

Let’s hope we can have a preview feature in the future :crossed_fingers:

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