• Hey Guest! Ever feel like entering a Game Jam, but the time limit is always too much pressure? We get it... You lead a hectic life and dedicating 3 whole days to make a game just doesn't work for you! So, why not enter the GMC SLOW JAM? Take your time! Kick back and make your game over 4 months! Interested? Then just click here!

Editing software for cutscenes

D

deem93

Guest
Hi.
Can you recommend me a free/cheap editing software for my 2D cutscenes.
What I'm looking for is a program that would allow me to add some simple elements to my premade cutscenes such as zoom ins/outs/camera manipulation, cross-disolves etc.
Thanks!
 
rIKmAN

rIKmAN

Member
deem93 said:
Hi.
Can you recommend me a free/cheap editing software for my 2D cutscenes.
What I'm looking for is a program that would allow me to add some simple elements to my premade cutscenes such as zoom ins/outs/camera manipulation, cross-disolves etc.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Not sure what you mean by editor - all the things you mentioned can be done in GML using views, cameras and surfaces.
 
D

deem93

Guest
Since all my cutscenes are premade animations outside of GM, I would rather add those finishing touches in a separate software and just drop finished animation in GM.
 
Yal

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
GIMP is free and powerful, but is hard to use (and lacks a good way to handle animated images). It works if you just need to do finishing touches, though.
 
rIKmAN

rIKmAN

Member
If you want to animate cross dissolves and zooming etc, I assume these animations are going to be full screen?

If so, that really isn't the best way to do it as that will be a lot of large full screen sprites per animation which is going to give massive amounts of texture page swaps and take a lot of VRAM once the images are loaded.

You are much better off doing any camera / view manipulation or full screen cross fade / dissolve effects in code using the camera system and surfaces as I said in my first post.

I may have misunderstood what yoi are trying to do though.
 
D

deem93

Guest
@Yal yes I am very familiar with GIMP and that's what I'm currently using, but like you said, it is far from ideal for animation.
@rIKmAN I don't know if I understand. The thing is, the cutscenes are not done in engine, they are (for the lack of a better word) "cinematic". They are separate from anything in the game regardless, so I might as well work on it in a better suited software.
That is the idea anyways. It is still WIP, but once I have something presentable, I might post it here to give a better idea of what I need.
Still open for suggestions regarding software though.
Thanks!
 
rIKmAN

rIKmAN

Member
@deem93
Unless I've misunderstood then the effects you are going to animate (cross fades, zooms etc) are full screen effects.

This means that even in a low res pixel art gaming at a size of 640x360 then you are going to have to load in your animations as sprites with each frame being a 640x360 image, then multiplied by the number of frames.
Increase this number if you are using a higher resolution for your animations.

That is going to eat a lot of VRAM when images are loaded as well as take up a lot of texture pages (increasing texture swaps) simply due to the amount of 640x480 frames in each animation.

It would be better to load in your smaller (ie, not full screen) animations of characters etc, and then use GML to apply the effects you want using the camera / views for the zooming and surfaces for the cross dissolves etc.

As I say I may have misunderstood and you may not be using full screen animations, but I'm just going off what was in the OP.
 
Rayek

Rayek

Member
I would suggest OpenToonz, which is open source & free, and excellent for all sorts of animation. If you intend to import pixel art, the render options have an option to keep it pixel art when it is scaled up, if necessary (output settings-->Resample Balance-->Closest Pixel (Nearest Neighbor).

OpenToonz does tweens, frame by frame, has a very nice timeline, works with layers (called levels), does parallax layering using pseudo 3d space, and camera control is very simple. Multiple cameras can be set up for easy view switching. A wide range of effects via a node editor are available.

To export to various additional formats, the FFMPeg encoder must be installed and OpenToonz be told where it can find that (preferences).

Very professional animation software (it is used by Japanese animation studios for feature-length animation films), and it may take you a couple of days to get used to it. Very, very, powerful. It's amazing it got open sourced two years ago, and by now all the kinks and bugs have been ironed out. The GUI is quite pleasant. I love animating in OpenToonz.

But as far as I am aware, you would still have to invest in a video play extension like GMLvideo to play the result in GMS.

Get the latest builds of OpenToonz at https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz_nightlies/releases

PS @deem93 it's a shame Game Studio doesn't include a timeline editor with key frames, and the option to animate anything like some of the main competitors, because I would have advised you to use that instead. That said, the primitive timelines function in GMS might help with cutscenes as well.
 
D

deem93

Guest
Thanks for all the answers! I went with Shotcut and as of now it seems to do all I need.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top