Lip Synching Creating sequential drawings that simulate what a character looks like when they are talking.

Lip Synching is a powerful part of the Toon Boom tool set. It can be approached in a few different ways, with different consequences in the final result and the amount of time put into it.

While Toon Boom does have automatic lip-synching capabilities, it looses effectiveness in longer clips. If your sound clip is longer than about thirty seconds, the lip synching may get jumbled further along in the clip. One solution to this is to use separate sound elements, each containing a portion of the overall sound clip. Now when you run the Lip Synching on the clip, you'll have fewer adjustments to make.

The adjustments to lip synching can be made in a number of ways. The first way is to make changes in the Sound Editor itself. This is the fastest place to do the work because it has the fastest reaction and the quickest user interface, due to the simplicity of the design (this part uses buttons) and the proximity of the parts of the interface used.

Using this process, the user can run the lip synching process on a sound clip, then make any changes to the reading quickly in the Sound Element Editor.

The limitation to this method is that it lacks the ability to include any user defined visemes. However, it is the fastest place to make initial changes to any errors made by Toon Boom in reading the lip synching.

Once the initial read is handled in the Sound Element Editor, the user can then use the Modify Lip Synch Mapping to apply the synching to a drawing element. The drawing element in question must be prepared ahead of time with frame names that match the A-G, X frames used by the lip synching editor, It is possible to include additional drawings in this element, but these basic eight lip synching drawings must be included.

Now the user can drag through the timeline and make further corrections using the Cells tab in Properties. It may be tempting for the user to make all corrections with this method instead of using the Sound Element Editor, but using the Cells Tab is actually slower, and should be used only for fine tuning and including additional visemes not recognized by Toon Boom, like L/D/Th.