VSA Routine Building Questions

**Brother Grim** · 10-11-2011,07:27 PM

I'm on my way. I have my 3 axis dialed in, I found a test routine and I think I'm good to go finally. Tonight I built a wave file that's about 3 minutes long and I have a few questions. If you could help me out I'd appreciate it.

1. Some of the talking is mixed in with music, is there a good way to do the jaw to wav analysis where the jaw doesn't trigger with the music? I tried recording my own voice speaking the parts but VSA didn't really open the jaw a lot... very small peaks.

2. Head movement - is there an easier way to build the head movements into the routine than keying it in frame by frame?

3. If I have some movements from another routine is there a way I can copy those and paste them in at a specific spot where I want them? For example, let's say I want to take the entire PAN line from Routine A and paste it into Routine B but start at frame 1000, can I do that? I know I can copy individual events and paste them at the beginning but that presents two issues. They aren't where I want them and 1000 individual events is a lot of mouse clicking.

So what say you VSA routine masters, where can I learn this stuff? The online help is kind of lacking.

Thanks

**bfjou812** · 10-11-2011,07:58 PM

What version of VSA do you have? I just purchased version 5 and have not had a lot of time to use it . I also have version 3.1 and I was pretty good with that.
The question about the jaw movement , that is one way to do it , some people have used a tone or just introduced some sort of noise to a single track, export that , do the wma , after you are sastified replace it with the original track.
the head movement , the best way to do that I know of is to use a program called TrackSkull by Monkey Basic. It is fantastic and relativley easy to use, here is a link http://www.monkeybasic.com/ he has a bunch of easy to use software at a very reasonable price. He is also a member here and is very helpful.

**Brother Grim** · 10-11-2011,08:14 PM

Thanks BFJ, can you clarify add a tone?

**bfjou812** · 10-11-2011,08:29 PM

It's usually a tone generated by a tone generator , DMTF? I think that is right........if you're using Audacity it is in the toool bar.

**Brother Grim** · 10-12-2011,06:06 AM

ah yeah, I've played with that a bit. I think I was doing the concept with silence generation. Helps me pick out the peaks. Any tips on pulling voice from music?

**bfjou812** · 10-12-2011,06:17 AM

I've tried to seperate the voice from music and have been unsuccessful. It was explained that the way music is recorded today the vocals are mixed with the insturmental portion as one track,even though it is a stereo track. If you find anything please let me know!!

**Dark lord** · 10-12-2011,06:24 AM

I 2nd Trackskull ( on sale now ! ) & there is no real program for pulling voice from audio. I've had to make my own talk track while listening to original with music. Haven't settled down with my new trackskull & logitech 3D stick controller yet, but have a feeling will be a lot easier to program movements.......just remember to set recording tracks to 30 FPM in VSA to match Trackskulls 30FPM.

**buckaneerdude** · 10-12-2011,07:39 AM

TrackSkull works really well for programming jaw motion for singing. You set the minimum and maximum servo positions in TrackSkull and the trigger control of a joystick will operate the jaw. After practicing a few times, I found that a quick tap on the joystick trigger would partially open the jaw and a full pull would open it wide. It didn't take me more than a half hour or so to get pretty good at it. Then I just used TrackSkull to record the actions of the joystick and exported the TrackSkull file for import into VSA. So easy. In fact it was so easy, I went back and reprogrammed all of props for their singing parts. For voice only, wavemotion analysis works really well, though sometimes you might need to boost the "Scale" % to get the full range of jaw motion you need.

TrackSkull has saved me countless hours and the results turned out better than if I had done it all the old way. Well worth the money. You're going to want a joystick too if you don't have one. I recommend the Logitec Extreme 3D Pro ($29). This joystick has a twist axis that can be mapped to the head pan/rotation. I've used a traditional joystick and the rotation is controlled by a separate lever and takes two hands, one to operate the joystick and the other to operate the lever. With the Extreme 3D you have rotate control by just twisting the joystick left or right, nod by tipping forward and back and tilt by tipping side to side. Oh, and I recommend programming the jaw motion separately with TrackSkull unless your hand/eye coordination is exceptional.

Last year I even used TrackSkull to program our coachman's animated arm:

**scubaspook** · 10-12-2011,08:10 AM

I am for trackskull. I probably would still be programing the skulls if it weren't for trackskull. There is a control in VSA (at least my older version) that when you click or double click on it it brings up a seperate window with a servo pictured in it. As the routine plays you can move/record the servo movements by dragging the servo arm arm around in the picture.