My daughter made an animation that play perfectly while in the program. After export as a movie the animation is out of sync with the music. At 6 fps the animation is to slow, at 7 fps the animation is to fast. Also, I have tried to upload the project file but it says that I am not allowed to do that as a new user.
@OldeSchoolWolf Hi, welcome to the Pencil2D forum.
We can take a look, but i’m afraid this might not be something that occurs due to the program failing or something that the program can fix automatically as i’ll explain below.
For now please send the file over wetransfer.com which allows you to send an anonymous link that will be deleted in 1 week automatically. Please use this guide to learn how: https://wetransfer.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004254743-How-do-I-send-a-link-transfer-
Apologies if the following description is a bit too long, but I feel it’s necessary to explain in detail for future reference
From a professional standpoint, 6 or 7 fps is not an adequate playback speed for animation. This can also lead some video players to not properly play non-standard FPS (which can be a point to troubleshoot further on your machine). Standard FPS speeds range from 24 FPS (Film, Web) to 30 FPS (NTSC TV Standard)
It’s also important to note, that If the animation is too short, some players tend to also cut the beginning an the end of video files, so you might also need to troubleshoot this by getting a player with frame-scrubbing capabilities (like the free Quicktime player, which still works under Windows 10 and macOSX systems)
When you play a sound file, it will play normally regardless of the FPS you set. To my knowledge the FPS here will only determine how fast your animation images are displayed in Pencil2D, so you actually have to “match” the images to the sound, so to speak.
Unfortunately in animation the FPS has to be planned and setup in advance so the images are properly laid out to match…but having to preserve the timing of an existing animation while changing the playback speed to a different FPS will force you to spread out the drawings along the timeline to match the sound.
Just so we’re clear, a lower FPS will give the impression of a slide presentation rather than an animated movie, whereas a higher FPS will cheat the brain to accept the illusion of motion due to the frequency of images being presented thanks to the principles of phi phenomenon and beta movement (or the so colloquially called eye laggard)
Now, if you set higher FPS, invariably you will need to make sure the drawings are placed with more distance between each other along the timeline. This will ensure that there are “more” frames to look at during a set period of time across the video, but since the rate of playback (fps) will be higher it will compensate the effect.
So basically the more frames there are along the timeline, the slower an animation will look. The less there are, the faster it will look, and you compensate this with a higher or lower FPS spacing out the pictures accordingly.
If the changes are too drastic it will take time to re-organize the pictures so it matches the sound, but that’s unavoidable and the work rests on the animator.
Additionally there is also a known problem with sound playback perception in Pencil2D for certain filetypes, but only inside the editor, it does not effect the export process (however this may or may not be affecting how the original animation playback is perceived as well).
For example, if your daughter imported an MP3 file, these files have been recently found to become inaccurate during playback in the editor. As such we’re recommending that users convert MP3 files to WAV files using the free audio editor tool Audacity (http://www.audacityteam.org)
You can follow this guide to export a WAV file with it and later try out if the playback effect in Pencil2D helps to properly position the drawings and match the sound track.
Here it is:
@OldeSchoolWolf Hi. Here’s a direct download with two videos and a modified pencil2d source file.
Please try playing back these two videos and see which one works for further projects. Both were exported with Pencil2D. One is of type MP4 and the other one is of type AVI.
For me the MP4 didn’t play back in VLC video player, yet the AVI did. One of the developers told me again that low frame rates might be hard to playback. With other video players such as quicktime player and windows media player, both files played properly however.
I must also note that as explained in the previous comment, I converted the MP3 audio to WAV. I’ll also attach the Pencil2d file with the converted WAV audio so you can test it as well on your machine.
This is as much as I can do without trying to re-time the animation to a higher FPS setup.
If this does not solve your problem please let me know and i’ll direct you to use a development version of the software to try and export the file, but other than that it might be required to consider retiming all the images at a higher FPS rate.
p.s. When a drawing has to appear for a long period of time you only need to draw a single image and it will show on the video until a new keyframe is placed.
p.s.2 you can move multiple frames by pressing & holding ALT key and clicking & dragging one keyframe. Then the other keyframes to the right hand side will move in tandem. Be careful though as this might corrupt the file in memory as you’re displacing a lot of images at the same time, so it’s better to save copies in advance before trying this out, just to be safe.
We converted to the MP3 to WAV but but nothing had changed functionally. It played fine in pencil 2D but the video played slow when exported. The animation can only be exported as an MP4. How did you export as an AVI file?
@OldeSchoolWolf Hi. The sound conversion is to avoid an issue with Pencil2D during playback.
To export AVI go to File > Export > Movie > Browse > In the filetype list field you can change from MP4 to AVI
My question is, did any of those videos played back properly for you? because for me both played properly on my system.
- MP4 didn’t play nice with VLC, but it did with Quicktime and Windows Media Player.
- AVI played fine with all my video players.
When I say it played fine I mean it played identically to the Pencil2D editor.
We downloaded the files and played them both. We also exported to an AVI file as well. It is the same problem every time. We use windows media player for playback.
As far as I could tell from the animation on the original project the images were matching up well with the sound, both in the editor and on the exported video for all the video players I tested after using AVI files.
For example all the written words aligned properly with the lyric beats on the song as well as some moments where the characters were changing positions on the screen.
Just to rule out any other possibility, can you send over the file(s) that you exported so we can compare it to the other ones I sent?
Unfortunately I’m expecting that I’ll be seeing it playback fine on my end, but if that’s really the case I’m afraid the only thing I can conclude is that there may be a particular issue with your system and video players that we’re not aware of, and this simply does not allow you to watch the video properly on your end.
If you can try downloading other video players like VLC (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html), and even try a free video editor like http://www.shotcut.org or https://www.openshot.org just to see if those playback the video properly.
Another quick way to see is to upload the video to youtube privately and play it back on the web browser, though this might have youtube force convert the video to a 24fps video due to their upload content standards, and in such case i’m not exactly sure if the video will be sped up wrongfully by their system, so know that this is a possibility.
Other than this I’m not sure what else we can do as it doesn’t seem to be a problem with either the animation software nor the user, as such the advice I can provide is limited beyond the troubleshooting we’ve done so far.
It seems to be working today when using AVI. I think she played the wrong file yesterday after exporting to AVI. Thank you for your help.
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