Simple Animation (Festival)

This functionality was added to CINELERRA-GG by the original author to create simple animation. The file type for this animation is Scene.

To get started making a simple animated movie copy from the directory:
<cin_path>/cinelerra/tests the text2movie and text2movie.xml.
You can see what this does via File → Load... → text2movie.xml. The file text2movie acts like a normal asset, except changes to it are immediately reflected on the timeline without reloading and the length is infinite. You can just edit the text2movie file to change the script. If the length of the movie increases, drag the right edit handle to extend the edit or use the pulldown Edit → edit length. There is one audio channel created for every character. The frame rate, sample rate, frame size, and camera angles are fixed. To see these values, right click on the asset and look at the Asset info.

Currently the functionality that is implemented focuses on dialog between two people. The models are defined in model files saved in CINELERRA-GG's executable directory (for example, /opt/cinelerra/models). The character model and voice is selected separately in the script. The model files have the same name that appears in the script and are usually saved in the directory the script is in, but there is a defined search path, if not. You can create new models for the script without affecting the entire system. These models define the total size of the model along with the images used – the model images are 2D png images because all the animations are baked. Since there is no 3D renderer, no custom movement is supported.

There are currently 2 actions implemented:

1. Character2 can cut off character1 if character1's dialog ends in “...”
2. Inserting “[pause]” anywhere causes the character to pause. This is useful for adjusting the timing of dialog.

This is simple animation so you can expect speech synthesis not to be that good. And you will have to adjust punctuation and spelling based on the sound. Since the dialog is rendered on-demand, there is a delay when each character starts to speak but you can split dialog into shorter blocks to reduce the delay.

You can see a step by step example in the website http://www.g-raffa.eu/Cinelerra/HOWTO/animations.html