Lyric as an animation tool - An Artist perspective...
by ed wuillermin
on
Jun 12, 2009 at 3:07:37 am
The title of this post says it all...Please, ALL opinions would be a huge help to me in our search for a new tool in our pipeline. The prospective user base are already versed in AE, MAYA and Max.
Re: Lyric as an animation tool - An Artist perspective... by Erik Hammack on Jun 12, 2009 at 6:39:11 am
Lyric makes me want to call Chryon and ask if Dilbert, Wally, Alice, or Asok are available.
What is your intended use? Lyric's domain of usefulness is extremely narrow. Technically, it can animate, but the way you go about it will make anyone versed in AE, MAYA, and MAX tear their hair out.
Re: Lyric as an animation tool - An Artist perspective... by ed wuillermin on Jun 12, 2009 at 12:34:51 pm
Presently we utilize Lyric as a to-air playout for movies created in AE and flipped to .LTV's.
We are interested in a real-time graphics workflow solution with artists creating and animating assets natively inside the Lyric environment for realtime playout(template based or not). Lyric Pro has what looks like a robust toolset that may be suitable to our task.
So with our creation/animation background being what it is (CS3/Maya) and the assumption that the toolset is adequate, the question basically boils down to the workflow within the Lyric creation environment - intuitive? counterproductive? Could we be better served with another product solution?
also, Erik can you elaborate on some of your comments above? what frustrated you? Narrow focus in what way?
Re: Lyric as an animation tool - An Artist perspective... by kurt murphy on Jun 12, 2009 at 3:02:36 pm
I'll expand a bit on what Erik said with my experience with Lyric... It's the worst piece of crap I've ever worked on. Unfortunately, it's also the 'industry standard' so stations are forced to deal with it. It's buggy, clunky, completely non-intuitive and poorly designed. Basically, it's the antithesis of After Effects. It usually takes me 10 times longer to create an animation in Lyric than it does in After Effects - and because of the tools, it won't look nearly as good. There are bugs that they've been promising to fix 'in the next upgrade' since we've been using it (well over a year now), that still haven't been addressed. I swear this machine has taken 5 years off my life.
You'll end up creating all the elements in Photoshop and After Effects (and a 3D program) anyway and exporting them out to Chyron. Ideally, Adobe should make their own real-time on-air system, based on their desktop products. But they don't, and there's no real way to play real-time, updatable animation on-air so we're left with Chyron and Vizrt (I don't know how good/bad Vizrt is). Lyric is based on some really clever ideas, updated messages, persistent pages, real-time 3D... Unfortunately, there's a pig wrapped around it.
