Animating Notes

[sandman]

I recently animated drums. Now I’m animating my xylophone. In order to achieve overlapping animations to notes coming in at something like 16th notes at 120 BPM ( 8 beats per second) with my 4 frames at 30 FPS animation, I gave 4 tracks per drum so that up to 4 notes can overlap in a given set of 4 frames at 30 FPS.

To export drums took ~5 minutes for a 4 minute long video with 8 drums * 4 tracks per drum = 32 tracks + background image tracks = 34 tracks. This is fine.

To export xylophone with 25 keys requires around 100 tracks, and now also instead of an image background for drums, I have a 1080p video background for xylophone. Now it says it needs 25 minutes. Not unbearable, but not super great either if I’d like to pump out videos like a well-oiled machine.

For reference, my timeline looks like this. Basically a piano roll from a DAW, but each note has a very short duration ‘pop’ clip.

Any tips to cope or speed things up?

[sandman]

Here is how that looks if you’re curious! There’s a solenoid under each key, so you can’t really tell which key is being hit during playback from a normal camera angle like this, hence the animation!

Xylophone Animated

Also, I had to rotate the video relative to the original animation positions since my webcam seemed to drift slightly after fine-tuning all the positions. Also there’s audio from the recording of the video that wasn’t supposed to make it in there, but whatever!