What is the best method for creating a master 'scene' in illustrator, breaking it up into the individual images you need to animate, and importing them into VideoScribe?

Once the vectors are brought back into VideoScribe, they don't line up.  They always come in centered in the screen, so we have to manually move and zoom the image back to it's proper place, which causes problems since we don't know if they have been zoomed and panned exactly right.

I've tried creating a default, invisible 'boundry box' that gets saved with each image, that helps a bit, but there seems like there should be a better way!

Am I missing something?

Thx.

Mike

The boundry box method is the only method that results in automatic alignment of multiple image parts.
 It tends to result in all of the parts importing a little smaller and blurrier than they would otherwise. You can correct this with a higher image quality setting but that results in higher memory usage.

Complex scenes might not always be the best choice. Instead of complex scenes with backgrounds and other parts that need to fit together in the same scale, I would recommend individual images that help the viewer remember key points and phrases of the voiceover.  lots of unnecessary background art may become distracting and muddle the message while the viewer attempts to keep up with what is being animated.

As a general note, sometimes whiteboard videos are not as successful as they could be because the creator comes up with an idea (that might be better suited to live filming, or a long page of printed  text ) and then tries to shoehorn it into videoscribe instead of learning the strengths of videoscribe first and then planning the script and the video to take advantage of those strengths.

-Mike (videoscribe user)

 

Thanks Mike for your input.  

Unfortunately, we are not always in charge of the design concept that we are given.  We have jobs where the end result, and artwork, are predetermined, and it's our job to make it happen as best we can.  Due to time and budget, that usually involves taking the artwork, breaking it up, and animating it back together.  Video Scribe offers a nice, unique, and usually time-saving way of doing that, as compared to other programs such as After Effects.

I realize all programs have the pros and cons, and I'm just trying to figure out the best way to get around this one issue.  So far, all I've been able to figure out is the bounding box approach.  It would be nice is there were some simple numerics available to the user, (x,y position and scale), where we could place each image, without the bounding box issues of memory and size...

My current approach involves having a master invisible bounding box that gets exported with each element from Illustrator.  In Video Scribe, I have a master scene at the beginning with it's position and scale set to where the bounding box hits all edges.  I import all elements into copies of that master scene.  As the project develops, and I have to make changes by adding or breaking up elements to tell the story better, I have to make new copies of that master scene, and import the new elements.

This all seems to work, but I guess the point of my post originally was to see if there was a better way, under these circumstances.

Thanks again for replying...any input is truly appreciated!

Mike