Magpie Pro Feature Tour: 1. Media formats
Audio and audio/video files are used in Magpie Pro as a reference to animate against. These are the audio and audio/video formats that are supported:
- wav (Microsoft Wave)
- aif aiff (Audio Interchange File Format)
- mp3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3)
- mov (Quicktime audio and audio/video)
- avi (Microsoft Video for Windows)
Characters (called Actors in Magpie Pro) can adopt different poses at different frames. Poses for 2d actors are represented by images. These are the image formats that are supported:
- psd* (Adobe Photoshop)
- jpg jpeg (Joint Picture Experts Group)
- png (Portable Network Graphics)
- bmp (Microsoft Windows Bitmap)
- tga (Truevision Targa)
- tif tiff (Tagged Image File Format)
- gif (Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format)
- xpm (X Windows Pixmap)
- * A single image file with layers can be used to specify a 2d actor that can be imported into Magpie Pro in one step. Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, The Gimp and other utilities can be used to create image files with layers.
For 3d actors poses are represed by 3d models. The following 3d object formats are supported:
- lwo** (Lightwave Object)
- 3ds (3D Studio)
- obj (Wavefront Object)
- * A single object file with endomorphs can be used to specify a 3d actor that can be imported into Magpie Pro in one step. Lightwave 3D, FaceGen Modeler and other utilities can be used to create object files with endomorphs.
The audio waveform and video frames (if available) are displayed in the Timeline pane, along with the animation keyframes and curves.
Figure 1.1 Timeline pane horizontal configuration
Figure 1.2 Timeline pane vertical configuration
The images and 3d objects associated with actors are displayed in the Actors and Preview panes, discussed in more detail in the following pages.
The task of listening to the audio track frame by frame, then assigning poses to these frames and finally checking the resulting preview animation is the basis of performing manual lip-sync in Magpie Pro.
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