Best way to have audio synced up with PNG sequence?

[Joe Adam]

Hello everyone!  So, the extent to which this question relates to OpenToonz specifically depends on... the answer....  :P

I've animated my scenes in OpenToonz, and they have some sound effects.  I've been exporting them as PNG sequences, because the Wise Ones of Animation tell me that I must only create actual video once it's all been edited together. 

I'm planning on doing my editing in the Blender video editor.  But what I really don't know (I should have decided this earlier!) is how I'm gonna get the audio to fit to the video, the way that I've got it in OpenToonz right now. 

The main idea that occurs to me is to somehow export the audio track separately from OpenToonz.  (Can OpenToonz do this?)

One thing I've heard is that you can construct the audio tracks in Audacity, with labels for animation, and then animate to those.  The problems being (1) this would require me to reconstruct the scene in audio form in Audacity and then change everything in OpenToonz to match it, (2) I don't know that OpenToonz supports labels anyway (not that that would be 100% necessary), and (3) the implication that the animation process is predefined by the audio process seems a little odd to me.

So I guess here's essentially my question:  What are all you people doing?  :3  Surely most of you who are using OpenToonz must be using audio.  What's the best way to deal with this problem?  I want to figure out what will work the best before I try to put it all together. 

Thanks!! 

[Joe Adam]

What I ended up doing is exporting the scenes as .mov files, then using Audacity with FFMpeg to extract the audio. 

But not only is this an unnecessary extra step, it won't work in the long-term, since support for .mov is being dropped.  The only other format I saw that could work was AVI, and when I tried rendering to avi, it kept crashing... (I don't know, maybe it didn't like the tiny resolution I was using (16x9)). 

Anyway, my point is, in the future it would be awesome if we could export our videos as .WAV files!   :)

[Herbert123]

In the latest version mp4 and webm with sound is also supported.

But I agree that export to a wav file would be nice. It does open up a can of worms: ideally OT would enable the user to choose how much each channel plays in either the left or right stereo, or even support Dolby surround.

My own view is that we should not be editing sound in OT at all. The final quallity soundtrack should be added in a video editor with good sound control afterwards. As long as you keep track of when each sound should be added, it is simple to take care of sound dubbing after rendering the frame sequences. Exporting a wav file would be quite handy in this case, though, to simplify timing - especially with voice overs and sound fx.

Perhaps Turtletooth can add WAV export using the built-in FFMpeg export?

[TurtleTooth]

That shouldn't be too hard.  Can you remind me and make an issue?

[Herbert123]

Done! Thanks - wav export would simplify certain workflows tremendously.