Well, howdy. If you are like me, you went scrubbing the internet looking for ways to speed up GoAnimate. When I searched there wasn’t much out there…so hence this post. Usual Disclaimer: There’s lots of factors involved in setting up a workable environment for any application, I am just sharing what worked for me and if it helps…yay! While I am here, I shared some other tips and tricks for making animations.
- Use a decently fast connection. DSL will not do it, must have cable or FiOS. Sometimes corporate LANs are too slow as well (like the one at my work).
- Use a work station with a good graphics card and 8GB or more of RAM (4 cores or more CPU). Minimum recommended is 4GB and 2 cores. Close ALL open applications, close any other web browser tabs, close any system tray apps, stop any unneeded services… really try to make sure Go Animate is the only thing running on the machine. Then if you have a little extra CPU/RAM (Use Task Manager to see where you are), you can open other apps as needed.
- I used Chrome – that seemed to perform better than IE, however, Chrome does have a memory leak and it slows way down. Saving the project, exiting ALL open Chrome windows, restarting Chrome and reloading the project seems to be the work around. Generally, with 4GB, this tactic buys about an hour or two. On my 8GB workstation, I had 4-6 hours before it slowed down.
- All assets take up resources, so only load the ones you need into your library. Also, when adjusting the camera angle, delete any assets that are out of frame and won’t be seen.
- Go Animate cautions that tight camera boxes (zooming in on a particular person in a scene) is not preferred, but sometimes, unless we want to redo all the backdrops, its just gotta be that way. Still, any time there is an opportunity to leave the camera “full size” and adjust the background and character size to fill the space, that is preferable (According to Go Animate).
- Build videos in chunks of 15-30 scenes per video. This will keep the total number of assets to a minimum, and keeps the total project size small, it also allows multiple people to work on one project (since video projects cannot be shared). As resources permit, you can build longer vids with more scenes. When it comes time to build a complete video, use the export feature and then link the exported videos together in a good video editor.
- Be careful when sharing a login… the latest video saved wins – so if two people work on the same project, someone’s changes will NOT be saved!
- When loading up dialog for a cartoon, it is best to do a reading, then based on the quality of the sound, do noise removal and normalization as needed. Chop the reading into lines and export those as MP3s (do not use WAV files – those are wasteful). Save each MP3 based on either a known scene number, who is saying the line and the first few meaningful words of the line. If there are multiple takes of a line, indicate the take number either in the file name or store each take in a folder.
- Any image can be a prop, but not all props are interactive with the actors in the cartoons.
- When setting volumes, Go Animate doesn’t have many options for fine tuning. I found setting all the dialogue to 200% as a base level and then bumping quiet people and lowering loud people created more control over the dynamic range. As mentioned previously, normalizing the audio helps also.
- Have a quick wave editor like Audacity (with LAME plugin for MP3 encoding), makes changing/chopping audio much faster.
Many thanks to FootSockToe, for responding quickly to this performance thread on the GoAnimate forums.
Happy Animating!