Test Lip-Sync
Giving Misty a voice
Yesterday morning I thought it would be fun to test the mouths that I recently created for Misty. I tried to make it all happen by using open source software.
I needed to find a voice for Misty and discovered Jenny Mayhem. She’s a up-and-coming singer/songwriter has real talent. I downloaded one of her short and sweet songs to use for the test. I encourage people to go to her site and check out her music.
Getting down to work
First I took all the screenshots and cropped them for editing using Gimp. In the past, I’ve used OpenShot for video, but I thought instead I would try PiTiVi. Neither of them can scrub audio, which is a huge problem when trying to sync video with audio. I was actually shocked by that because I thought it was pretty basic. It was frustrating at first. I even pulled at Papagayo at one point, but decided to brave the storm with PiTiVi. At the end of my experience, PiTiVi started crashing frequently. Every time I made a change to anything I made sure I saved the file. And rendering the final video was a pain. I kept getting errors until creating a .mov file finally worked for me. That was until I tried posting to Vimeo and discovered that the audio was just static. I tried the same file on my Mac and it suffered from the same bad audio. I patched the audio onto the video quickly in Quicktime 7 Pro and reposted it to Vimeo. How weird is that.
On the upside, PiTiVi has a great and really usable interface. I liked working in the program. The only thing that they may want to consider are simple features like actually being able to scrub audio, not have the program crash every time I blink, and actually getting a clean and rendered file would be heaven.
Lightworks for Linux can’t come soon enough. I hope I don’t have to wait until half past never for it to become a reality.