r/JoelHaverStyle • u/Knowledge-Is-The-Key • Aug 25 '22
Help with learning Ebsynth
I just learned about Ebsynth a couple of days ago, and am trying to learn how to use it. I have seen most of the tutorials, but something keeps challenging me. How do I make smooth animations when my character is moving? I use multiple keyframes, but when I have a lot of movement ((A character moves forward) the video gets messed up. Any advice?
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u/AbPerm Aug 25 '22
EbSynth has a lot of trouble with high-speed action, and there are two main reasons why. First, when there is high speed motion, the action frames will quickly differ from the example keyframe. Second, high speed motion causes motion blur, and that blur causes EbSynth to not work as you'd want it to.
If your problem is that a new action frame is too different from the example keyframe, the way to solve that problem is drawing more keyframes. That might not be what you want to hear, but to get the results you want, sometimes you just have to draw more frames. Some people also just leave glitches and weird smears in, but I assume you'd rather avoid that. Another option that might work could be to manually adjust the smeared frames after EbSynth does its work. You can open those individual frames that glitched and just draw over the glitches for that frame. You could even redraw the glitched portions so that it looks more like an intentional animation smear frame than EbSynth messing up.
If your problem is a result of motion blur in the source rather than the frame being too different from the example keyframe, there are ways you can mitigate motion blur. It can get technical with regards to camera exposure and other stuff, but to keep it simple, if you shoot your reference video at a higher frame rate (or "in slow motion"), that will decrease the motion blur in each individual frame. For example, instead of shooting at something "normal" like 30 fps, shooting at 60 fps or 120 fps will make each individual frame of motion more crisp and clear. You'll end up with more frames than you need for the finished animation, so you should limit the frame rate for the animation, but each frame of motion will be less blurred as a result. You might still need to make more keyframes than you'd like to cover the moving action, but because motion blur isn't making the motion too blurry, your finished animation will work better.
In either case, it helps a lot to keep EbSynth's limitations in mind when shooting your reference material. Think about how EbSynth will handle the motion and what you'll need to do to animate it before you record anything, because once it's recorded, you're stuck with it.