Q: In your video "the high class stuff", how did you animate the sheet music?
A: i will explain a single page first (the multi-page spread is another issue)... let's say there is just one page of notation, like 8 bars or whatever.... I make the notation in a notation program, and screenshot it. (then i actually make several allignment adjustments in graphics, because notation programs are incredibly finicky, it's easier to adjust things in graphics)... then i save it how i want. then i use graphics to erase the last note (and any chord that goes along with it.) i erase notes on a staff by just dragging empty staff over it. and i "save as" and then add a 1 to the file name. repeat, keep erasing the next note and 'save as'. then you have a stack of files all in order. then import. then allign the timing. it's the exact same way i do text, but with text i type it out and screenshot each frame, and delete words (easier, instead of erasing them). the delete technique would not work in a notation program, because the notes and allignment will change as you delete them. that's why i use graphics. it's not that hard, and i'm not even using a graphics program. just an image preview program, and i'm just copying and pasting boxes. the mccartney video was a bit more ambitious because i wanted to do a steady scroll. so i thought it would be good to make one huge image file that is the entire length of the score. and then do the erase per frame technique.... so then all the frames were huge... and then export that to a really high res video and scroll the video??? i don't remember if this was successful, but you run into major problems when you try to do huge things like that. processing power limitations, etc. Same sort of crisis occured when i was trying to do the zoom out on the japanese army. i ended up having to sonehow break the task into smaller pieces. if i recall. i somehow succeeded in gettiing a steady scroll on the notation, only to find out that it was too hard to read when it's moving like that!! so i ended up keeping it still and then sliding forward page by page. if i had known the steady scroll wasn't going to work, i probably would have broken it into pages from the start. i was on a 7 day vine schedule at that time, so that video was an insane time crunch, and the notation took me from about 3am straight through the entire day until 4 pm and was barely on time for work. (not to mention COMPOSING the rhythms and chords, and composing the notation, before animating it.) it was a bad and unhealthy time crunch. i suppose thats what you get for attempting a 30 sec (45 sec? whatever it is) video in place of a 6 second video. was in such a rush, there is a smudge in the youtube version (a stray piece of a note that didn't get erased fully)