F.A.Q.

1. How come it's still a manual system? What's the story behind this?
   
   I first designed the software as a way to teach lipsyncing to starting animators. The normal teaching process, depending on the school / training facility, used anything from the windows media player, audio players like sound forge or adobe premiere or the built in players in 3d packages like Max or Maya. This wasn't effective as not all of them filled the teacher's requirements which in general were:
   • The package had to be simple to use. Lipsync was just a part of the animation courses and should not hog the students time so the learning curve of using the software had to be short.
   • The students should be able to play the audio at different speeds to facilitate the lipsync process.
   • Keyframing should be built in i.e. the students shouldn't have to write it down on paper somewhere.
   • It should have a 2D and 3D mouth display so the student can view the results immediately without any need for using flipbook applications or rendering.
   I also design motion capture systems and I was using this as a base for designing a phoneme recognition system so I placed a spectrogram display there for my own reference so I could do some debugging. The users of the software liked the spectrogram display so much because it actually gave them a visual reference, a new way of "seeing" sound so I left it there.
   
   The later on, I found out even the experienced animators in some of the studios I knew bought the software to use in actual production because it was simple to use, didn't change the way they worked and made the work go faster.
   
   And that's how Spectralipz started! :-)
   
   
2. Aren't motion capture / voice or phoneme recognition systems better at lipsync?
   
   My answer is that you should use what works for you. I've designed facial capture systems based on both video and audio and everything has it good points and bad points. Companies that I 've worked for all had different priorities. For example, a 2D animation company doing contract work would definitely stay with the traditional method of manual lipsync. A 3D animation company doing a full length feature would want to be able to edit / tweak the animation data so they wouldn't want to use facial mocap systems. Companies doing a low budget TV series on the other hand might go for the automated systems because the volume of work they do and the tight deadlines.
   
   
3. You're using the Preston Blair mouthshapes. We use something else. Can you change the mouth shapes used?
   
   Yes. You can create your own mouth shapes. Read the documentation on the "The Mouth Shape Definition 2D File Format".
   
   
4. There's a MAX import script in your tutorial. Do you have support for MAYA as well?
   
   Yes, but I'm still working on it. It'll be up soon. :-)
   
   
5. What if we use a skeletal / bones system in our 3D facial setup?
   
   Then you would need to create a script that reads the exported file data and instead of setting keyframes on a morph shape, you set the keyframes on the bones that control the mouth. For scripting stuff you'd really need to have a guy who does scripting.
   
   
6. If we buy the system now, are we entitled to updates?
   
   Yes, you'll receive updates for a period of one year from date of registration/purchase.
   
   
7. What sort of background would you need to learn the software?
   
   As I mentioned above it was first designed as a teaching tool so even beginners would be able to use it well.