Cameras Scene Cut, Transition and Parallax

I think I've been running into the same challenge. 

I have a 3 minute audio file of a conversation, which I would like to animate into a conversation between multiple puppets. For ease of use, I would prefer to have that audio file within a single "Scene", and be able to cut back and forth between different puppets who are having a conversation, each with their own background. 

I've been able to do this by overlaying all 4 puppets in the timeline, each with their own background as part of their puppet. Then, as the first puppet's dialogue ends, I keyframe that puppet's opacity to drop to 0%, revealing the next puppet in the timeline so that that puppet will be visible for the next lines of dialogue. And when it's time for the first puppet to resume speaking, I keyframe his opacity back up to 100%. 

Toggling keyframe opacity between 0% and 100% for all four puppets is a bit tedious, but it lets me cut back and forth within a scene. If you know of another way to do this, I would love to hear it.

For transitioning scenes I think you are on the right track with using triggers to say trigger replays to fade backgrounds in/out. Remember that you can define multiple triggers independently with the same key. So 'b' can trigger one background to appear and another to disappear. But as soon as you say transitions I think of using a replay - you need to use keyframing or similar to adjust the opacity to make things fade out.

Funky idea - you could have one scene with multiple puppets in it off the edge of the screen. E.g. X=0 to X=2000 might be the first scene and background. Then at X=5000 to X=7000 you have another background and puppets. You then use a trigger on the camera position so the camera jumps sideways to display the right puppet and background (X=0 or X=5000). Think of it like a TV news desk with different reporters - you move the camera from the anchorman to the weather reporter - they are standing a short distance apart on the same stage - the camera moves between them. However I worry about performance having too many puppets in such a scene.

Glad you're liking the cameras feature!

Triggering scenes - good question. You can drag a scene into another scene - but I don't think triggering will work as you would expect. BUT what I would recommend checking out is the "Start Here" project on the home screen. Basically, there are a bunch of puppets and backgrounds, and they're getting switched between via triggers AND there's a camera too. So it doesn't feel impossible / too crazy to me to keep everything in one scene like that...I think if you pick apart that cartoon you'll get some great ideas.

Parallax is not yet in the app - there isn't any z-depth yet - so for now you have to fake it like I show at the end of the Cameras tutorial video. For walking though, you could add a Walk behavior to foreground and background elements and have them all move with the character - see the "Brooklyn Buddies" on adobe.com/go/chexamples as a great example of this.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

Thanks for appreciating the new additions to the applications.

Is there a way to use this method to mimic cut scenes and transitions too? If there is a way to cut between scenes will it continuously record between them sort of like a master camera instead of the one camera locally in one scene?

Is there a way to program a way you can make is so we can add a list of background, midground and foregound layers(Character included) into the camera function with a way to program the distance between the background and foreground in relation to the midground. Then have the camera movement calculate the distance between the layers in the list and move them in the x and y position to create a fake dynamic parallax affect between them and maybe add motion blur feature too to help create the illusion of the character is moving in a certain direction during a character walk cycle? I am not sure if this function will be worth using for everyone who uses this program, so can you add a parallax, motion blur feature checkbox to turn it on and off for people whom do not want to use it to save processing power.

I've shared the questions you've asked with our engineering team to check if it is possible.

I'll update as soon as I hear from them.

Thanks,

Shivangi