Animatic Notes


What's an Animatic for?

The purpose of the animatic is to work out timing, camera & composition issues in 3D before you start spending a lot of time animating. Things that work in your storyboards might not work in 3D, and you may find that different shots needs more or less time than you previously thought. (Usually more.)

So when you're putting together your animatics, think a lot about:

DON'T think much about:


Putting together an animatic in Maya


Shot Compositing

Now, to composite your shots together... you can use either Adobe Premiere, or After Effects for this. In general, Premiere is for cutting shots or sequences together, and AE is for compositing individual shots. However, since your shorts are... short, AE would work fine for putting it all together as well, and is much easier if you're already familiar with it. If you haven't used either program before, Premiere is probably simpler to get into.

When you create your new Premiere file or AE composition, make sure your settings match your respective settings. So: width 720, height 480, pixel aspect ratio 1.0 (or 1.2 for widescreen), frame rate: 30 fps. In Premiere, you'll need to go to New Project -> Custom Settings and change the editing mode to Desktop, first. In AE, just go to Composition -> New Composition. You can leave audio settings as they are by default.


Exporting

For compression, we'd recommend using Quicktime, and for compression using either Sorenson3 (faster export, larger file) or H.264 (slower export, smaller file).

Also, Windows Media Player is clunky sometimes so you should use Media Player Classic to play media files instead. It's much lighter, and... works better. The other nice thing is that it's a standalone .exe file. You can find it in the main directory of your network space.