Lip Syncing

[Airrest]

I've GOT to know how LittleKuriboh gets the lip syncing in YGOTAS so perfectly. I'm wondering if there is some kind of trick to it or some kind of plugin. I honestly can't think of a way to do it as nicely, accurately, and smoothly as he does.

Does anyone have any clue?

And no, this is not the reason I really signed up for this forum. I plan on staying.

[ThePRPD]

Frame-by-frame lip syncing.
It isn't as hard as most people think it is but it can be very tedious at times.

Just take a snapshot of each mouth movement frame.

Example:
First snapshot - no mouth movement
second snapshot - transition from no mouth movement to mouth opening
third snapshot - open mouth

Carefully compile them together to match whatever your character is saying.

I'm sure someone might have a better explanation than I.

[Animagess]

I'm a student of animation so stuff like this interests me out of necessity, but I think ThePRPD is pretty much right. If you watch a Disney movie, lip-syncing to it the way LK does would be nearly impossible because they move around so much you can't loop it. But because the Japanese animation industry was basically a post-WWII effort, resources were slim and everything was super low-budget. The anime "style" of holding everything in the frame perfectly still while only the mouth moved came out of this lack of money, but then it became convention and so even blockbuster titles like the Miyazaki movies do it. Compare this to, say, Princess and the Frog, and it's amazing how much the characters flail around while they talk!

Anyway, yeah, I'm guessing it's a loop of about two or three frames, repeated for as long as LK's dialogue. You can tell in some places where the character moves in the middle of a sentence, the mouth doesn't match up as smoothly as when they're just standing there (which is often). It's basically like operating a Kermit the Frog puppet- the mouth just opens and closes, and there's no effort to animate the ennunciation of each word. In a bigger budget production like Akira or most Western animation, their mouths form words properly and the dub isn't as well disguised.

Case in point: Watch the scene in ep 25 (Dirty Dueling) when Yami gets tricked into dating Tea and he swears a blue streak. It's just the same animation cycle looped over and over until the dialogue runs out.

(Well, that was really long and I basically just repeated what the previous poster said, but I'm fascinated by the idea that there are historical as well as technical reasons that anime is better for this sort of thing than Western animation. Because knowing is half the battle!)

[Airrest]

Thanks for the info. I never thought of just looping short periods in that exact way. I knew it involved looping like that. Also I know that the animation style of anime makes it a bit easier but it has still got to be time consuming even looping short clips until the audio runs out. Just though maybe there was an easier way.

[ThePRPD]

Originally Posted by Airrest

but it has still got to be time consuming even looping short clips until the audio runs out.

When it comes to making videos and syncing your own audio to a characters mouth movements doing the lip sync frame-by-frame is definitely more time consuming. Sometimes it can be very easy and other times you'll want to pull your hair out.

Trying to loop a single clip of animation to fit mouth movements can be a lot less time consuming. If done right it can look pretty good but other times it can look very sloppy.

As Animagess mentioned they're times where you can't edit lip movements at all (like when a character is moving in a certain fashion) you'll just have to settle and go with it.

[90HeroMAXD]

framing is fun. Usually a mouth frame is three so about each word should be those three frames(give or take) You might need to shorten the sentence or so to make it look more convincing when someone is doing an action so say (this is an example)
Someone is saying: Everyone jump into the chopper, but its just a constant loop of a guy moving right and back to his original position, put in something quickly into the chopper. So the frame takes less and the loop might not happen. Im not the best animator, but I enjoy learning about animation. Lip Syncing is just trail and error. With less errors though. At times you will stumble upon a few mistakes, but nothing more then a little crop/delete button can't do