Sound in animation

[BobWiley]

I was just wondering how people are putting sound in their animations. Every program I use seems to shun .MOV and I have to then convert to .MOV loosing a lot of quality. I would like to know what program people are using to put the animation, sound, and the title/1 second black screens together. Thanks.

[Kevin41]

I have not done any animation work but i have done alot of work with video editing. I personaly use Sony Vegas to do my editing and it does not lose any quality when working with .mov files it also is a relitivly simple workflow to add music and add titles along with fades and other vedio effects. The software is not cheap. many other video editing softwares will alow you to work with .mov files without losing video quality after adding music. Pinacle studio also does a simaler job with a simpler workflow.

Again i have not personaly worked with animations but once it has been rendered out most video editing softwares can take it from there to get the finle product just right

hope this helps

[lilwupster]

From past years, it seems that Autodesk would prefer you didn't use any 3rd party programs for the FIRST animations.
That leaves two options for adding sound.
1. Use Combustion, I personally have not used it enough to know how, but I believe you can add one track of audio which, if you need multiple then you can compile just the sound from a program such as audacity.
2. Put in the sound before you render in Max. To do this, you want to go the Graph Editors --> Track View-Curve Editor --> right click Sound (make sure it's highlighted first), and choose properties. From there you can choose an audio file (I know that .wav and .mp3 work and probably others are supported). This is also a one track deal (someone correct me if I'm wrong there), and you can compile seperately for the audio.

For non-FIRST animations though, I use MAGIX Movie Edit Pro. It's only about $50, supports 16 tracks and .mov along with some others.

As for the black screen and parts of an animation, we have always used Video Post, which can be found in Rendering --> Video Post. It's pretty cool and has a lot of options and I won't get too far into it here. Just one thing to note, if you add a pre-rendered video file in Video Post, it'll strip it of it's audio.

Hope this helps!