BoardMaster Help

Playing the Animatic

Animatics are static images with sound that are used to display the story before going to full production. Using the main menu, choose "Animatic" - "View Animatic" to begin displaying your project or use the icon pictured above that is located in the project toolbar. If you have an image selected on the storyboard (a green box displayed around the panel) the animatic will begin playing from that panel. If no panels are selected the animatic will begin displaying from the beginning of the story. To stop the animatic from playing, press the left mouse button. To pause the animatic use the right mouse button. Animatics use the sound and panning settings that were specified in the Panel Sound and Timing setup.

In order to save your animatic select "Animatic" - "View Animatic" from the main menu. The following dialog box will be displayed.

Select the "Create AVI File" check box, then select the "Start Animatic" button. BoardMaster will present you with a dialog box. In this dialog enter the name of the AVI file BoardMaster should save your project to. The sample rate tells BoardMaster how fast to sample your animatic. A value of 1 will tell BoardMaster to sample as fast as possible given the speed of your system. BoardMaster suggests using higher values to slow the sample rate. This will help to reduce the size of your AVI file. You can also select the width and height of your AVI file in this dialog. Finally select OK. You will be presented with a second dialog for video compression. The values in the drop down list are for different codecs on your system. These codecs can help to compress the size of the AVI. You will need to experiment to find the best one. Note that some codecs may not be on everyone's system.

Once you select the codec BoardMaster will play the animatic and record the AVI file to the file name you had specified. When you stop the animatic BoardMaster will ask you if you want to have your wav files added to your AVI. This is optional.

In order for an animatic to be exported properly with sound the following rules must be applied.

1. All images must have a sound file attached
2. All sound files must be WAV files. MIDI files are not compatible.
3. All sound files must be of the identical Frequency, BIT size and Stereo setting. For example 22,050Hz - 16 Bit - Mono - 43 kb/s. To check the setting for a given WAV file, you can open it using Windows WAV recorder and select file properties. The WAV recorder can change the format of a given file for you.

See about Adding Sound and Recording Sound for more details.

BoardMaster suggests setting the sample rate to approximately the frame rate for best results. BoardMaster does not restrict the width or height of the AVI that you create, but does caution that recording AVI files at large sizes (600 pixels by 800 pixels for example) may not produce desirable results.

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