Yolo

Yolo is a Java program for creating timesheets to sync animation to a pre-recorded audio track. In layman's terms, Yolo generates a set of cartoon-mouth positions so that animators know how to draw a character's lips at certain points during a scene so that the animated lips match up with the voice-actor's dialogue.

Strengths [Weaknesses]

Simple

Yolo syncs mouth position to audio with the use of a plain text transcript. That is all it does. It has no further features and attempts to be no more than a simple lipsync timesheet generator.

Java

Yolo is written in Java. It's simple to get running, and will likely continue to work with little maintenance for a very long time. It is also natively cross-platform, so in mixed production environments, it is ideal.

Weaknesses [Strengths]

Simple

Yolo is a very focused application and does a great job at correlating plain text with audio waves, but it isn't the next big thing in voice recognition. It does not transcribe audio for you, it doesn't animate the mouth movement (aside from keyframes, technically), it just generates a queue sheet for animators.

Install

Being a Java application, Yolo requires that Java is installed. Install Java from either the /extra folder on your Slackware install media or from Slackbuilds.

Install Yolo from http://slackbuilds.org.

Usage

The Slackebuild provides a .desktop file, so Yolo is easily launched from the K Menu. If you want to launch Yolo from a terminal, you must launch it with Java as its host:

$ java -jar /usr/bin/Yolo.jar

Once launched, load a .wav file from the File menu → Open.

Yolo does not “understand” the recorded dialogue; you must feed it the recorded dialogue and a transcription of what is being said in the dialoge.

By default, the Open File window displays only Yolo lipsync files (.ls), so click on the Files of Type option and select Wave Audio Files.

Select the .wav file containing the dialogue you want to sync, and click the Open button.

Yolo loads the .wav file and display it on the timeline.

Add a transcript of the recorded dialogue in the main text field. If there are multiple sentences in the dialogue clip, place them on seperate lines.

After you have entered the dialog text, press the Convert Dialog To Phonemes button at the bottom of the Yolo window.

Yolo automatically breaks the sentence(s) into separate words, and the words into phonemes. It displays the results on the timeline, with the top row (in green) containing sentences, the middle row (in orange) containing individual words, and the bottom row (in purple and pink) containing phonemes.

Re-Timing the Dialogue

Yolo usually is very accurate, but if you need to adjust what it has detected, you can resize any of the rows by dragging and dropping. The corresponding rows automatically resize.

While fine-tuning the timing, Yolo plays back the portion of the audio that you are dragging across. Double-click a row to play the portion of the audio that corresponds to it.

To move a band without resizing it, click on the center of the band and drag it, or just hold down the Shift key and click and drag from any point in the row.

Adjusting Positions

If you don't like the phonemes that Yolo has suggested for a word, right-click on the word you want to change, and enter new set of phonemes. Once you're happy with the lipsync set, save it as a Yolo lipsync file, or export it to Magpie or Moho formats from the File menu.

If you prefer a plain text dump of frame counts and mouth positions, select FileCopy to Clipboard and paste the data into any text editor of your choice.

See Also
Papagayo

R S Q