Live action with animation

[corrinnel48458502]

Hello. I am trying to decide what products to buy for my film project. Does this animation software have capabilities of layering animation on top of previously recorded live-action film? I am trying to incorporate cartoons into film (similar to the style of Mary Poppins or Lizzie McGuire). Will this program work for that and if so, how would I do that?

Thanks!

[kglad]

yes, it can do that.

the first decision, though is how is this going to be displayed?  a mobile app?  a web-based display?  an installed executable?

[corrinnel48458502]

Thank you and yes it would be a video file like Colin said.

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

As it's a film project I'll assume that the final output is to be a video file.

The highest quality way to work would be to make an H.264 compressed version of your video footage (most MP4 compressors will use H.264), import that into Animate, add your animations on top of the video, and then do a File/Export/Export Video to get the animation as a video file.

You would then use After Effects or Premiere to combine your original uncompressed video with the animation layer video. The H.264 compressed video that you imported into Animate would not be exported along with the animation. But that's ok, in Premiere you would want to work with your original uncompressed video.

[corrinnel48458502]

Thank you so much!

[Colin Holgate]

I was testing something unrelated, but could be of some use to you. Since around November Adobe Animate has been able to export as SWF Archive. That makes a zip file of each layer in your animation, as a separate SWF file. After Effects can import those as separate video layers. So, if you can work in After Effects you could skip the export as video approach and instead do Publish Settings/SWF Archive, Publish.

You would need to be up to  date with Animate an AE for that to work, but it could save time and make it more flexible, in that you could apply different AE effects to different layers of the animation.