April L. answered • 07/16/24
Animation Teacher
So how does one speed up the process of lip syncing?
Animators have a lot of patience. Animation needs a lot of persistence. Animators who have drawn examples all the basic mouth movements based on a mouth chart will have an easier time speeding up their lip syncing process. Animators that have already recorded the voice of their character free of too much background noise will have a good reference to listen to while drawing the facial expressions and body movements of their characters.
To expedite the process some animators have option of auto-sync features in their animation software.
How does one auto-detect the lips sync process? Animators using Toon Boom Harmony are able to use the automated lip-sync technology. They will first need to make sure the audio is cleanly recorded without too much background noise in the recording. They can import the file of the recording into the animation timeline. Next the user selects auto-lip sync detection in the software (either in the timeline, layer properties, x sheet or sound element editor) this allows Toon Boom Harmony to detect the phoneme (the smallest unit of physical speech sound) and you can assign the mouth drawing to each of the typical phonemes. This is what is called the auto-sync feature.
Animators who animate with software sometimes have features that auto-sync to make the process go faster. With Toon Boom Harmony software, for example, users have the choice to use an auto-sync feature created to automate the lip sync process. So if in situations where there is a lot of talking and want to speed the process up they can choose to use the auto sync feature.
