Lessons

Lesson Info

Exporting

So at some point, you're going to arrive at a completed performance that is ready to export. And there are a few different ways you can export this to work with other tools. You can actually set up a dynamic link between Character Animator and Premiere. You can also export a file, you can even export a PNG sequence, and so on. So we're going to have a look at that now, at exporting the completed sequence. We'll go to the file menu. As for getting your performance out, what we're gonna do is look inside the file menu, and you can see the export menu towards the end of that menu. If I come down to that there, then these are the options that you have here. Now Adobe Dynamic Link between Premier and After Effects is really really cool because it means that while you're putting the sequences together in Premier to actually build out a title, you can come in and make changes, and that dynamically updates in the Premiere file, when you come back out to this, and that's a really good way to wo...

rk. If you're working with a different editing system, which is entirely possible that you're doing that, and you can't have Adobe Dynamic link on there, you might be using Character Animator and other things but maybe you prefer a different, non-linear editor as they're called, an NLE, or video editor, let's keep with it that way, whichever you're working in, you might not be able to use that workflow, so you'd have to render out. But that's slower, of course, because what it means is you actually have to render the movie, send the movie across to the editor, the non-linear editor, not the person, or the piece of software you're using for video editing, and if anything's wrong you've gotta come back to Character Animator, do all of that and render it over again, which of course, all takes time. Whereas if you've got something that interoperates in this sort of cyclic workflow where you can work like this and it dynamically updates in that other piece of software without you rendering out, then that's an ideal, if you can do that. You might also just be using this in isolation, you might be doing just this one thing here and rendering out, it's good for that. So the options you've got here are video via Adobe Media Encoder, and that will handle swap-outs of the Adobe Media Encoder application, which is excellent for doing all sorts of things, translating or transcoding between different formats. It's great for rendering at different sizes. Lots and lots of different things with Adobe Media Encoder. PNG sequence and WAV, that basically exports you image files along with an audio sequence, and you may use that for some After Effects workflows when you're doing those kinda things. Means you're gonna get a lot of images. As you can imagine, 30 frames per second at, how many seconds we got here? We've got 30 seconds, so 30 times 30, that's a bigger number than I can think of off the top of my head at the moment. Okay, so that's the frame rate I've got for this, and it's typically the frame rate you have for any of those things. So that's gonna give you that and an audio file. You can export the frame as an image, you can export the puppet also, just so you know. So if you need to share a puppet with somebody else, you can export that puppet, drop it into your Creative Cloud folder, and they can, if you're collaborating with that person, then they can pick that up straight away. And live options we can look at in just a little bit. So I'm just gonna go across to Adobe via the Media Encoder, just here. And it's gonna ask me what I want to call this one, so I'm just gonna call this Creative Live CA with TH. Why not make it a really really long silly name like that? So Character Animator with Tony Harmer, there you go. Aka the Design Ninja. Where's it gonna go? It is going to go into my documents folder, that's just fine. What's the file format? I'm gonna use H264. So MP4 there, H264 wrapper, and hit save. So it takes that information, takes it across and launches Adobe Media Encoder. Now you might have various different settings for how you're going to work with your exported file. Best advice I can give you is ask for advice, because there are so many different settings that can change your output from here. So if you are working isolation on your own, you can pretty much choose. If it's something you're gonna stick onto YouTube afterwards or something like that, export it to MP4. If you're gonna use it inside of some other projects, export it to MP4, but you might need to use different settings if you're working with somebody else. Ask, lots of people forget to ask other people about how they're expecting to get their content back. Don't fall into that trap, yeah? Nobody's gonna be upset with you for asking them. Or if they are, then they're totally unreasonable, don't work with them ever again. But they're not. It's much better, from the point of view of interruption of a workflow or a process, for people to ask questions at the beginning than it is to get something they didn't want or cannot use, and then have to come back to you, it's awkward on both sides, to say, why didn't you ask me? If you think about it, that's a lesson in so many different things. It's that, just a couple of minutes just to ask, even if they go, god, you don't know that, so what. Everybody has to start somewhere, right? Don't be afraid of doing things like that. So this is handed over to Media Encoder here. At the moment, this is where you can change all of your different settings here. So I've got, underneath island, so the area we're looking at here is what's called the render queue, because it might be that you export several scenes out and render those at the same time. Just leave Media Encoder to do it while you go and do something more interesting like a fab lunch or whatever else. Or get on with another job, start drawing something else, more importantly. What it's gonna do in terms of the data transfer transfer rate inside of it, so those are things you can change. There are some presets in there. Always ask, like I said before. And basically, where the file's gonna go at the end. Now I did determine that in the export dialogue from Character Animator, but maybe I changed my mind or somebody said, oh no, don't save it there, it needs to go here, right? So you've got the option to change that. It tells me its status is ready to export, so I'm just gonna hit this green triangle at the top right here, inside the Media Encoder window. I know you can see me behind in the camera just there, so I'm gonna hide that for a second. I'm gonna hit that, like so. Underneath that you can see the encoding area starting to work, underneath that, and it starts building our file. And you'll start to see the frames appearing and the progress there. And it think it's going to take, it looks like, about, I don't think that's gonna be 30 seconds, but we'll see, it might be done before we wrap, maybe it isn't. But you know where to find it. So while that's actually doing that, and we'll come back to that in a moment, one of the great things about Media Encoder is you can go and work elsewhere while that's just doing what it does. I'm gonna swap back to Character Animator, and I'm gonna turn off the camera just for the moment. You can actually livestream directly from Character Animator. So you can put on a performance, so I said right at the beginning of this particular class, I've done this before, I've actually streamed to YouTube as, and indeed to Facebook, as my Design Ninja character. So the character's been there talking for me. I do a few events where they actually get me to do some promotional social for it, and I actually do that as the character. It's really easy because they don't actually see my mouth. It's just a load of shadows, they fill in the gaps. The streaming workspace is the last one of the workspaces at the top of the interface in Character Animator. If I click there, it's going to give me some other options and it will talk to be about generate controls, blah blah blah. Now, there's a little bit more to streaming. Don't think for a moment that this is gonna be really easy, oh, I just hit stream and I stream. It doesn't work like that. Because what you actually need to do is you need to hook Character Animator up to a broadcast client. So that's a particular piece of software that will handle your stream, because it's not that straightforward. You have to have this big, long encoded stream of data and it has to go to a specific server on the channel that you're going out to. So if you're going out to YouTube, you've got a specific point there to go to. And if you have a YouTube channel, go to the creator studio in YouTube and on the bottom of the right hand side, as I recall, you will find your stream key there. You may need to enable it because it's not on by default. You have to let YouTube know that you wanna start streaming. There's a little form, and then it will generate you a stream key. And you put that stream key into another piece of software. Now typically, or no typically about it, you need two streams when you're gonna livestream. You need one in which the action is taking place, and you need another screen in which you manage the stream and the broadcast client to do that. Now I'm working mirrored here. These devices are mirrored together, so they're all seeing the same image, so you get to see that on the screens here, and indeed, on your machine. The client I use is free and open source, and it's called OBS. There are others that you can pay for that have lots more bells and whistles and aren't so flying by the seat of your pants. But they cost quite a bit of money. OBS, if I'm just gonna launch that now for you and show you what that looks like, I won't be able to hook it up here because it, and you get it at obsproject.com. Okay, I'm just gonna turn off these things here. Can you see how there's my screen disappearing off into the distance here? That's because this screen is actually set up as the thing that I would stream from, and it's recording there, and it's confused because I'm on the same screen as this particular window. So it's getting all, you see that, as I move it around? Very like, yeah, extra sensory. So I'm just gonna turn off don't check, and I'm gonna turn off the display capture here, because that's the thing that's doing it. So just like in Character Animator, with this client, if I hide everything else for a moment here, just so you can see this, just like everything else, you have scenes, so it might be that you're actually talking in person and then being the animated character in your particular stream. I've seen several YouTubers do that and some of them really funny, and some of the triggers they're using in Character Animator, absolutely hilarious. I saw a guy the other day who had a small character pop out of his forehead and was firing fire everywhere because he was angry about something, really funny. So you do different scenes, and that's just a way of saying, I want this particular set up at this particular time, just like in Character Animator. And then in the sources, you'd tell it where the video feed is coming from. And here I'd say it's coming, display capture, normally from this display, while I'm working on that one, but that's not how it's working today. And then in there, in your settings, you would actually set up your streaming key in this region here. I'm not gonna highlight it 'cause I'm not sharing my streaming key. But if you tap on that, that's where you enter your streaming key from the streaming client server, which the provider will give you. You'll get access to that, that will give you a really long key, it's something like 64 characters long. So very long, copy and paste it, don't try retyping it, across into there, and that's when you get it. And then you specify a time, let's just say YouTube, arguably, specify a time on YouTube that you're gonna go live, get all your ducks in a row, I said that really funny, get all your ducks in a row just there. So you're ready to go, you'll see the countdown on YouTube, hit that, and then your character will be live on YouTube. I can't go into any more detail on the process with OBS, sadly, I'm just gonna quit that for now, but let's see if Media Encoder managed to do that file. No, it's still doing it. It's got a couple more minutes left. But I'm ready to take any questions, if there's any there Jim, or? Yeah Tony, absolutely. We've got a couple questions over here. First question, one was like, how did you originally get started in doing this? Just sort of a higher level question. In animation? Yes, yes. A desire to make something was how I did it initially. My first actual movie was some hip-hop breakdancing Daleks back in the year 2000. So 18 years ago. I didn't have access to any animation software, and I used Flash and I exported from Flash to Quicktime and then got a friend of mine at the City of Bath College I the U.K. to help me translate that across to video, because I was trying for a job at an animation studio. I did background artwork for animation, but I actually wanted to be on the driving side of it. So that's how I did that. And generally, Tony, I understand every project is different, but how long will you dedicate to a project like this? Is it something you'll do over a weekend, a week, two weeks? Depends how passionate I am about it sometimes. If it's something I just can't wait, then I will not, I know it doesn't look it, but I won't eat or sleep or anything like that 'til things are done. I generally go by a rule of five to 10 around things. So if it's gonna be, you know, actually, it's more than five to 10, but days in terms of minutes. If it's going to be a five minute video, it's pretty much gonna take me five days to do that five minute video, for me to do it properly. There are other variables. There are how many characters there are in it. Because just as you saw me winding backwards and forwards with the different characters that you've got, or the different aspects or recording, of course, if I had another character in there, I'd then arm that character for recording and do the voice for that character, do the voice for that character, and so on and so on. So it depends, those are the variables you've got. How's the rendering going? Are you ready for another question? No, I think we can do another question even if the rendering's done. I can here the fans have warmed down, so it looks like it's actually there. So let's have a look. If I swap back out to here and I'll go to my documents. And there you go, let's just open that up in Quicktime. Let's, should we give that a play? So that's all working. That's ready to go. It'll be moving on to the next one, and done. Obviously, the more you do it, if you do it all the time, it will be quicker too. Because you'll become more adept at doing it. Frequency and repetition, Jim.