Spotlight on Synfig

The only thing I haven’t been able to do using free software since moving to GNU/Linux in 2008 is animate. And it bugged me. Everything else – raster graphics, vector graphics, offline video editing, audio editing, font design, desktop publishing – I could achieve, but animation was the reason I’ve had WINE and Macromedia Flash 8 installed on my machine for the past three years.

When I first started playing with GNU/Linux I came across a program called Synfig Studio which could do animation, but at that time it needed to be compiled from source code. It seemed a bit too much like brain surgery for a GNU/Linux beginner! However, the other day I was banging my head trying to do some animation in Flash. I decided to Google for any free software tools that might be able to help and I was reminded of Synfig Studio once again.

Blue hair? Why, it’s Mrs. Slocombe!

I went to the Synfig Studio website and the first thing I noticed was that a brand new shiny version of Synfig Studio was available as an RPM for Fedora. In other words, all I had to do was download, double click and go. Everything worked perfectly. I found the Synfig Studio website was excellent, there were a large number of tutorials and an extensive manual and so I set about reading.

Animation programs are always off-putting to beginners due to their complexity, and Synfig Studio was no exception – partly because it began life as an in-house tool in a professional animation company and that really shows in the power and complexity of what it offers.

I learned Flash 2 back in 1998 by trying to create the ATV Colour Zoom ident as I thought it would be quite a good challenge and force me to look into the tool properly. For the same reason I dusted off one of the more challenging animations in my “TODO” list to learn Synfig – the BBC South West Spotlight dots titles.

My plan was to draw the Spotlight logo in Inkscape, import that into Synfig Studio and then animate it. The first thing I did was set up my canvas. Changing the units to pixels is very important – Synfig Studio uses points by default which seems a strange choice for a tool not centred on printed work.

When I tried importing my artwork from Inkscape it came in at the wrong size:

Imported SVG from Inkscape

The reason was obscure and not what I had been expecting. I had assumed it was the old Inkscape dpi (dots per inch) problem, but it was to do with something called Image Span which is related to the aspect ratio of the end animation. After reacquainting myself with Pythagorean theorem I worked out I needed to set the Image Span to 16 for 768 by 576 pixel artwork from Inkscape.

Setting Image Span in Synfig Studio

Then artwork comes in correctly from Inkscape. However, now I could see some problems with imported SVG:

Problems with Imported Inkscape SVG

There were two problems – the holes had disappeared in the “P” and “O” and there was a segment missing from the circle of the letter “O”.

Paths with holes are imported into Synfig Studio as two objects or “layers” (everything in Synfig Studio is a layer) – the letter and its hole. To make a letter with a hole in it you need to place the hole layer above the letter layer, and then give the hole a layer an “alpha over” blend method. As you can see, the logic behind the program is very different to Flash!

Using Alpha Over in Synfig

The nick out of the letter “O” was Inkscape’s fault. When you convert text to paths in Inkscape you often get double nodes (nodes stacked on top of each other). Double nodes also cause problems in Inkscape itself so it’s always a good idea to merge these nodes in Inkscape.

The join nodes button in Inkscape

Inkscape ellipses don’t import as Synfig Studio circles (they come in as something called Blines instead), so I redrew the dots in the Spotlight logo as Synfig Studio circles to make animation easier later. In fact to get an ellipse in Synfig Studio you draw a circle and then apply a transformation layer to it – again, a bit strange for a beginner! So, now I had the artwork imported:

Inkscape SVG imported perfectly

I discovered I didn’t actually need the background rectangle I’d drawn in Inkscape in Synfig Studio, there’s a special type of layer for solid backgrounds called “Solid Colour” that always fills the background however large your animation is. This is analogous to “Background Colour” in Flash, only in Synfig Studio you could use a “Gradient” instead.

Now I needed to colour my artwork. I found a small bug in Synfig Studio which means that you cannot use the HTML-style RGB value (a six digit hexadecimal number) to enter colours. My background colour in hexadecimal was #171a17. When I entered this into Synfig Studio I got a mid grey, instead of the charcoal colour I was expecting.

A Lighter Shade of Dark

I went into the GIMP and discovered that #171a17 is equivalent to the the RGB percentages 9% 10% 9%.

The GIMP Colour Picker information dialog

I entered the values 9%, 10%, 9% into the Red, Green and Blue spinboxes on the Synfig Colours dialog box, and I got the colour I expected. However, I also found that the HTML code displayed on the Colours dialog became 010101 – not what I expected!

In Synfig Studio, the HTML code is wrong

The ever-helpful Genete on the Synfig Studio Forums suggested that I might have a non-linear palette selected for my file, but this turned out not to be the case. So the moral of the story is, sadly, only enter colour values as RGB percentages.

Speaking of colours, it would be great if Synfig Studio could load GIMP palettes, or create a palette from the currently imported layers.

I then set about animating. This is quite different to Macromedia Flash as in addition to “keyframes” you also have the concept of “waypoints”. A “keyframe” stores every setting of every “layer” item on the current canvas at a particular point, whereas a “waypoint” just stores one setting. You also have to forget about the concept of “frames” that was so key to Macromedia Flash. Synfig Studio, in common with Swift 3D, uses the concept of time instead. As far as the time-line was concerned I am very glad that I had done some work in Swift 3D before approaching Synfig Studio.

Keyframe labels appear on the canvas too

One thing I did like is the fact you could label not only your layers but your keyframes – that saved me an awful lot of scribbling! Once you have your keyframes set up Synfig Studio really excels. There are numerous different ways of defining how the animation gets from one keyframe to another. The default was TCB which gives beautiful naturalistic movement, but for Spotlight it would cause arcing like this:

Arc caused by TCB Interpolation

When I really wanted linear tweening to give me straight edges like this:

Corrected by Linear Interpolation

Another little gotcha I found whilst animating was that the time-lines starts at “0f”, not “Frame 1” as in Flash. This caught me out when I was putting the animation together as I was getting odd blank frames!

Whilst animating I came across a niggle caused by my operating System. In GNU/Linux Alt and left-click is used to move windows around. However, in Synfig Studio Alt and left-click is used to transform (i.e. scale) objects. Fedora 15’s deskptop GNOME 3 compounds this problem by removing the “Windows Movement Key” setting that you could adjust in Gnome 2 to change this behaviour. Fortunately the wonderful Synfig Studio forum came to the rescue as “nikolardo” had a cunning work-around:

“Another workaround for the Alt issue presents itself when you realize it only happens when you Alt-click. Pressing Alt and then clicking gets picked up by the WM (openbox, in my case), but clicking on a vertex and then holding the Alt key produces the scaling behavior intended. So, next time you Alt-click and the window moves, let go, and then click-Alt.”

Whilst working I found that “Groups” were not what I expected at all. The purpose of Groups in Synfig Studio is to collect disparate items around your animation so they can be selected together. In fact, when creating the animation I never used any groups at all, although I can see how they would be useful on other animations.

I loved the fact I could enter a frame number e.g. 454 to move somewhere on the time-line and it got converted into seconds and frames. I tend to think in frame numbers and it’s great I don't have to keep dividing by 25 and working out the remainder. This was a huge help when setting up keyframes.

Useful for creating guides at 0x and 0y

Another thing I found was I could use the Canvas Metadata window, which at first seemed useless, to adjust the guides. It would be even better if you could use pixels instead of internal units to adjust the guide positions in this window.

One thing I soon learned as I worked was that Synfig Studio’s canvas window is not always WYSIWYG, and the Preview Window isn’t always an accurate reflection of the end result either (but this is being rewritten for the next release) – you have to do a render in order to see how your final result is coming along. This is particularly true if you are using effects like Motion Blur. For instance, when the Spotlight S is rotating, this is what I get to see on the stage:

What you see in Synfig Studio…

Whereas this is what the end result looks like:

…is much more impressive when rendered!

Correction from Genete:

“That’s because your display quality settings were not set to high quality. There is a spin button on the top of the canvas that allows you to set the quality to 1 (better), instead of use 8 (worse) the default value. WYSIWYG is fully done always in Synfig Studio. The problem is that it takes some time to render complex effects like motion blur, duplicate layer, etc.”

For my renders I used a PNG sequence, and only rendered the frames I'd just worked on. One thing I noted when rendering is that the render progress bar and cancel button on the canvas window don’t work. In the future I would love it if a WebM render option was added to Synfig Studio, particularly given the popularity of YouTube.

Notice that zooms, blurs and colour corrections are layers.

As I've said before, in Synfig Studio everything is a layer. Not just every single shape but a whole host of other things such as colour changes, blur effects, tranforms. So, obviously the number of layers you get soon gets large and unwieldy. However you can “encapsulate” layers together into what are called “Paste Layers” and then deal with these encapsulated layers as one object.

The capsules show encapsulated layers

You may be thinking this sounds a bit like the Flash concept of having symbols, but it isn’t – yet. The encapsulated layers are still on the main canvas and therefore use the main canvas’s time-line. In order to use encapsulated symbols in a way analogous to Flash library symbols you need to “Export” the Paste Layer as a separate Canvas. It will then appear in the Canvas Browser.

The Canvas Browser

Now your capsule of layers is a canvas in its own right, with its own independent time-line and you can use it in a way akin to library symbols in Flash. As you work, you’ll find that the main canvas’s time-line gets cluttered with keyframes and waypoints, so it’s worth exporting encapsulated layers to simplify your work.

The only real downside of the Synfig Studio time-line design is shared by Swift 3D. It’s that you can’t add and remove things from your animation easily. If you want to “hide” something you have to set its amount to 0 and then you have to fiddle about with waypoints with constant interpolation in order to show it again. It seems too much work when you simply want to put things on and take things off of your canvas.

Exporting a Paste Layer after you have already done work on an animation needs some care. Key frames are not brought across to the new canvas, and the exported animation duration defaults to 5s (five seconds) which means you have to increase it to the right length manually. So, before you start work on an animation it’s better to decide upon its structure first. But that was always the case anyway!

One minor thing – I found that I could only remove things out of encapsulated layers by dragging and dropping which was not discoverable for me – I expected to find another way of doing it via a button of some kind too.

Put a space in an Exported Canvas name and…

Entering a canvas name with a space in gives a message telling you about the C++ standard type library throwing an exception - not something most cartoonists would find particularly helpful!

When adding an exported canvas from the canvas browser on your main canvas you can offset its start-point by any number of frames. However, the offset needs to be a negative number of frames to make it appear a positive number of frames later and a positive number to make it start earlier which foxed me for a bit too!

Anyway, enough moaning – these are only very minor points! What you should take away from all this is that with exported canvases I found I could work exactly the same way as I was used to in Flash.

This does the hard work in the Spotlight animation.

Meanwhile, back to my animation. I wanted to emulate some optical film effects in my animation. The first one, motion trails, was easy to do with the Synfig Studio Motion Blur layer. This gives you a huge amount of control over the appearance of your finished trail.

Software doesn’t get any more magical.

I also needed some “optical glow”. I achieved this very easily by using the Colour Correct layer. This actually had a setting for Over Exposure – the exact effect I wanted to emulate – built into it! I was absolutely amazed! And not only that, I could animate the Over Exposure setting too. Incredible.

A bit of Blur (of which there are a dazzling array) helped to sell the glow even more.

The range of effects you can add to your animations in Synfig Studio is truly overwhelming. I think I'll be blogging for months about the huge range of things you can do in Synfig Studio. It is an enormous amount of fun.

Zoom layers are a very clever idea.

To zoom in and out I used, naturally enough, the Zoom layer. Having a zoom on a separate layer is incredibly sensible when you actually start using it, but seemed very odd at first appearance.

And, it goes without saying, moving the dots around the canvas in Synfig Studio was simplicity itself.

So, here’s the finished result:

Did I mention Craig Rich knew my Granny…

Synfig files are very small and compact. The final file size was tiny – 11.9KB. I found that utterly incredible and it compares very favourably to Flash.

I could have completed these titles in about two hours in Macromedia Flash 8, in Synfig it took me two days to learn the tool and complete the animation which I was quite pleased with.

Synfig is an excellent tool that is staying firmly installed on my computer! I really love using it and I am excited about what I can achieve using it in the future and the vast range possibilities it opens up. It is powerful, flexible, stable and rewards the effort you put into learning it a thousand times over. It also has a friendly and helpful community. Recommended.