Want an Animation Critique? Use Quicktime!
Quick tip today, but a very important one a lot of animators seem to miss! When you upload an animated clip specifically looking for a critique, you’d do well to export and upload in Quicktime format. Why? Read on!
Animation, as you surely know, is an illusion created by playing individual drawings (or renderings) fast enough that the human eye sees it as movement instead of still images. In order to get the best analysis of it, though, you need to break it down into those still images again to make sure things are happening in the best way one frame at a time.
Unfortunately a lot of animators upload their work to YouTube or as animated gifs, which don’t allow this breaking down frame by frame. YouTube works well for showcasing animation, but not for critiquing it. Thankfully Quicktime works wonderfully for critique. You can go through things one frame at a time and roll/flip the images to see what’s going on and what needs improved.
If you want the best critique from other animators, present them your file in the Quicktime format. They will be able to give you a much more detailed critique on SPECIFIC things you can do to improve the animation, rather than general ideas like “it needs more easingEasing describes how softly a motion starts and ends through acceleration and deceleration. This is achieved by graduadl... More.”
And remember, you’re never done learning, so go out there and get some critiques!
this is good for youtube frame by frame
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/frame-by-frame-for-youtub/elkadbdicdciddfkdpmaolomehalghio
I don’t use Chrome much myself, but thanks for sharing the link! Hopefully it will be a help to others. 🙂
Thanks for the link!Quite a cool extension.
Nice post Riki!
Thank you so much for the link yoni salmon!!
I hate that about youtube! So many great animations on there and you cant sit and look at them closely because the streaming sucks. I use VLC on everything else.
There are a lot of programs that do frame by frame not just Quicktime.
Very true! My suggestion of Quicktime is merely because it is readily accessible, and also helpful to the person doing the critique. It’s certainly great when people have time to download a file and really make a lot of effort in their critique, but I think it’s useful to remember that they are doing you a favor. They’re giving you advice for free, where many people could charge for such a thing. Because of that, I think getting as many barriers out of the way makes sense! Quicktime exporting is a fast, easy way to remove some barriers so more kind people can offer help (which again, they’re doing for free)! 🙂
When I see someone post animation and ask for a crique on Youtube I always moan because it is so hard to see things on that crappy format! The best I think is to put it into a Dropbox file because then people can download it and put it whereever they would like to! You can even take it into software to draw corrections over if you want!
Good tip, thanks.
Another programs that are similar to Quick Time are VLC and VirtualDub.