Can't Scrub Sound... Please Help!

[jeffparadox]

Hi, I'm trying to do lipsync for an animation in Maya. It'd be a lot easier for me to hear sound while I scrub the cursor of the timeline. Like in AE when you hold down the "alt" key and drag your mouse on the timeline.

I tried holding "k" but it doesn't work. I also tried the script at Maya's help documents, but all I hear is pops and clicks. I'm using maya 2008, am I doing something wrong???

All help is appreciated
thanks

[loganb]

No help, but I know how you feel.

I'm lip syncing right now (maya 7.0) and the audio while scrubbing is just unintelligible squeels and pops, only occasionally does it sound like the audio.

On playback its sounds fine, but the animation cant keep up.

A far cry form scrubbing in Flash, which is clearly audible.

[joojaa]

Have you tried adjusting the way sound scrub behaves. Anyway in flash you in general animate with just half the fps of maya. Now sound is a series of oscilating peaks, and the smaller pieces you cut it up the less like sound it sounds, simply because the less peaks you have the less frequencies come up. So allways scrub in a few frames. The problem becomes worse the higher fps you have.

Also the speed at which you scrub affects the sound immensely. If you scrub at uneven speed then the sound would pitch shift. Maya avoids thsi on slow scrubbing by segmenting the sound because finding a specific tone is easier if you actually play it at that tone. So maya needs to stop between samples if you scrub too slow. So if you want a piece of thing to sound right you must scrub at actual playback speed.

The clicks themselves are just there for the reason of accuracy if you cut any sound into pieces it will click unless you fade the sound in. Offcourse this is a tradeoff, if you fade in the sound at each scrub then you loose some of the vocal input you need. So if the sound clicks you know thet sa part of thet cound is still continuing on the other side of the frame boundary. Unless offcourse it was a click.

A person who knows sound intimately can thus use theese facts to his advantage. But yes if you dont know how it iw then ist highly annoying.

Anyway, i would agree that sometimes it would be better that you could actually also time stretch slow scrubs instead of partitioning them. As this can be usefull in about 50% of cases whereas the native behaviour is fine in the other 50%.

[jeffparadox]

thank you for the replies..

I think I know where the problem is. I used another sound file, a song, and it works fine. The original sound track I'm lipsyncing onto is a well and clear recorded Mp3 file at 44.000 khz 32-bit stereo. I can see the clear waveform representation in AE, and it's loud enough.

When I import the sound into Maya as 44.00khz 16-bit stereo, or any other setting, the sound is still loud and clear during playback/playblast; but, the waveform representation is so small on the timeline that it's almost invisible, and all I hear is few quiet clicks and pops during scrubbing...

It's like Maya doesn't read and view that particular sound file as is, until I playback or playblast.

My playback speed in Maya is realtime, I used different settings for both wav and aiff file types and the problem is still there. I made the file extra loud in AE, but it didn't help anyway. Don't know if something is wrong with my sound file, or if Maya is not reading it properly. If anyone had a similar problem and can assist me, it's most appreciated