Nested Animations Desync

[MPoppe]

I'm having a problem with nested animations having their timing altered when the mother object is tweened. It's a bit hard to explain, but I haven't been able to find a solution anywhere.

Okay:

I have a pretty simple animated character with a mouth and a body. I've created a lip-synced graphic symbol for the mouth with cycling drawings to match an audio track. On it's own, the animated mouth symbol works perfectly.

Now, I've nested the mouth symbol within a body symbol so that I can have the body move around while the character talks and the mouth will follow it. Okay. But here's the problem: as long as the body doesn't move, the lip-sync is perfect, but as soon as I animate the body symbol in any way, the lip animation's timing gets distorted. Some phonemes last for more frames, some for less. The character will begin speaking in sync with the audio, but eventually the audio track will end and the mouth animation will be lagging to keep up with it. Listening and watching closely, I can tell one or two phonemes are displaying way longer than they should.

As far as I can tell, no frames of the mouth animation actually get changed in their timeline, they just render on the main time line at the wrong times. The mouth animation appears normal when viewed in its own nested timeline.

At first i thought this was just a memory issue and that the preview was just laggy or something, but the distorted animation is still there when I export to a video file. Naturally, this pretty much wrecks my plans for what will eventually become a more complex character with many spoken lines coinciding with full body actions. Kind of defeats the purpose of nesting animations if the timing of the nested animation isn't being preserved in the export.

If I'm doing something wrong, I can't find the explanation in any tutorial or user guide. If it's a bug, it's a pretty serious one.

Specs:

Recently updated version of Animate CC 2018

macOS High Sierra v10.13.3

3.2 Ghz Intel Core i5

32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

AMD Radeon R9 M380 2 GB

Thanks in advance to any one who can figure out what I'm doing wrong here, because I'm stumped.

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

When you animate the body, make sure that at every keyframe you set the body start keyframe to the correct one.

Say you have some tweens for the body from frame 1 to frame 30 and then to frame 45 and then to 60.

It may be possible that, for example, in the frame 30, your body start frame is set to 1 instead of 30.

I think it's worth double-checking this.

[MPoppe]

Hmmmm. I do notice this tends to happen when I adjust the keyframes of the body graphic back and forth on the timeline as I'm tweaking the animation. It's like the lip sync distortions build up the more I do that.

So every time I adjust a body keyframe, I should make sure the body start frame for that keyframe is the same as the frame on the main timeline. That sounds promising.

Where do I set the start frame for a keyframe? Is that in properties? I see a Sync box that was unchecked, but checking it doesn't seem to do much.

[JoãoCésar · Accepted solution]

Hi again.

With a Graphic instance selected, you can set the start frame in the Looping section of the Properties panel.

[MPoppe]

Yep, that did it.

Looks like the first frames of the keyframes stay the same when I move them around, and that was causing the desync over time.

Might get kind of tedious to check all the keyframes I'll have to make, but at least it works!

Thanks so much!

[JoãoCésar]

You're welcome!

[ClayUUID]

It sounds like you're using a graphic instance instead of a movie clip for your lips. Why? Movie clip timelines are always guaranteed to run independently.

[MPoppe]

I am using graphic instances.

I originally did use movieclips earlier, but they had some other problem that I could only get around by using graphics. I think they weren't playing at all on the main timeline, or I couldn't get them to. On the movieclip timeline they'd animate all right, but on the main timeline they'd just sit there on the first frame, so I had to switch to graphic instances. Don't know if that's an elegant solution, but it worked.

[_keyframer]

Avoid Movie Clips if your nested animation needs to be in sync with its parent timeline(s).

You will want to get used to the SYNC feature as well as how to control nested graphic symbol animations using the Frame Picker and/or Properties Panel Looping features.

Sync is an option of the Properties Panel when a KEYFRAMES that has a CLASSIC TWEEN applied to it is SELECTED in the timeline. What this Sync option (checkbox) does is sync/unsync the nested frames of the Graphic symbol being tweened.

When I need a nested animation to play smoothly and not "break" from its parent timeline during the animation process, I make sure Sync is checked. In some cases I animate not using Classic Tweens - BUT need the nested timeline to be synced. In this situation, I still will apply a Classic Tween to the parent timeline (even if there's no animation) and turn on Sync to get the nested timeline to sync. Then I can remove the Classic Tween if needed.