Best Practices for "Intro Video"

ellfire

Hello GS folks. I wanted to pick everyone's brains about how best to create an "animated" intro to a game.

At the moment, I created 7 still image panels that I have in a scene layered one on top of the other. Each one has it's alpha set to 0 until a specified time via a timer when it is switched to 1, thus mimicking a cut. In theory this works great...but then you add in a soundtrack. I created the soundtrack for the intro in a multitrack editor then exported into GS as a m4a. So, as soon as the scene starts, the "music" starts to play. (I put that in quotes because it is all the layered sound FX etc.), but I cannot keep it in sync with the panels for the life of me. This is particularly bad because I have some audio cues that need to be frame accurate to the cut. (Can you tell I edit videos on the side?) Trying to recreate the soundtrack as separately launching actors in GS isn't very practical, hence why I exported it as a music file.

Anywho, does anyone know of an effective way to do this? Creating an animation actor is out because they are full frame images and the length is 30secs. Thats a heck of a lot of PNGs to load.

Thanks.

The_Gamesalad_Guru

Bring in you audio as separate sounds and trigger them when you want, instead of bringing in a complete mix. Export them as mp3 or aiff and import them into GS as sound files not music files, this will allow you to control each sounds volume level and play them simultaneously. Use timers or rules with event attributes to trigger them.

crazyfishdev

could we get some video with audio because I'm kinda lost about why its not working...

ellfire

@crazyfishdev Sorry, I don't have a good way of snagging video with system audio to show the GS Viewer playing back the scene. I think part of the issue is that, some times, music files start to play back before the scene "starts". I.e. The music plays while certain elements are still loading even though they should all start at the same time. I wonder if programming in a a half second or so start delay to all the 1st actors would help.

tatiang

If you'd like to record system audio, you can use Soundflower. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3767714?start=0&tstart=0.

ellfire

So, I was able to make it work by forcing a delay. Ex. I created and actor that spawns the first panel and starts playing the music file 1 sec. after the scene has loaded. This keeps everything in sync but not allowing the music file to start playing before the scene really starts. Thanks all for your input. I know that creating events to generate each SFX would be preferred, it would just be a heck of a lot of assets to manage for one little intro.