LipSync MX 2

Hmm, lip-syncing. It’s not exactly the easiest of tasks, especially for those not animating characters on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the whole complex business of phonemes and visemes can be incredibly confusing, and can result in hours stood in front of the mirror gurning away to get the right mouth shape for your character’s dialogue – before any drawing or animating even takes place.

LipSync MX aims to offer a simple solution for those adding speaking characters to their Flash movies, by adding a sort of Toon Boom Studio functionality for those not wanting to veer away from Adobe’s animation application.

The idea is very simple. Firstly, draw your character’s visemes (a facial image that represents a phoneme or group of phonemes) and save it in BMP, GIF, PNG, JPEG or, and this is new to version 2, SWF format. Then, after importing an audio file (WAV or MP3 – the latter is another vital addition to version 2) into LipSync MX, you assign phonemes to these visemes. LipSync MX supports up to 40 phonemes in most languages, and with anticipation controls you can get good results in very little time – definitely less time than it would take to animate by hand. The whole lot can then simply be exported to an SWF for straightforward import into Flash.

LipSync MX is a simple, intuitive, highquality and, in fact, lovely animation solution for anyone wanting to add realistic characters to their Flash animations. It mixes neat automation with high levels of control, proving its worth as a valuable peripheral tool, especially considering its $99 price tag.