THAT'S RIGHT... today I uploaded my first ever...
CrazyTalk 7 Pro Comedy movie, to YouTube!

Title: SCREEM TESTS - Arnold Lawrence - COMEDY BY JOHNAVATAR.com

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA9tOSNd-AI

It's not perfect because CT7Pro is a bit difficult to work with, bugs and workarounds, but it still looks ok, for a few hours work and not worrying about perfection (if I had a budget, it'd be perfect..).

Take a look, tell me what you think!

Thank you,

Robert Moore
JOHNAVATAR.com
Email: JohnAvatar@JohnAvatar.com

Personally, IMO, I found your clip to be too long, and the image too static. I would have attempted several Arnold images as opposed to the one muscle pose, and swapped them in and out a bit during the dialog. Superimposing it over some kind of set would have added some atmosphere to the clip.

Also I do not find CT7Pro difficult to work with at all, and have encountered very few if any bugs that affected my workflow. It's actually one of the more stable and usable products in the RL lineup.

The idea is very funny, and I like your pacing of the camera close-ups.
Arnold's chatty teeth were particularly funny.

I agree with wizaerd, as you continue with these I can picture more cut aways, props (like as she describes her costume, that seemed rich for visual comedy), random backgrounds, etc....

Thank you for the replies.... Tell all you friends about this video and have them give me feedback at my email (JohnAvatar@JohnAvatar.com), or leave comments on the YouTube video itself, I would appreciate that to get some feedback.... I'm interested in knowing if people like these, or not.

This was my first real attempt at using CT7Pro and only spent a day and a half doing it.

I parodied "W Magazine" YouTube celebrity interview videos, where they don't have any prop's, only a static black background, so that's why no props, plus I wanted to do something very simple (and I hope funny) for my first attempts at CT7Pro.

I am working on a new, original, Web series that will have plenty of props and multiple characters.

I like CT7Pro very much... it's great! Worth the investment... but.....

I don't know if you're all on PC's, or Mac', but the Mac version has some issues, it's usable, but problematic.

As far as problems go, I have background in code, with 17 App's on the Apple App Store, plus years of Producer/Editor and Engineering (and programming) experience.... CT7Pro does have serious problems, though I like CT7Pro and plan to use much more. The most serious problem is, for some reason, on my MacPro, the boot drive is getting eaten up! I started with 100GB free space yesterday and after doing about 20, or more CT7Pro exports, the system announced I only had like 12MB available on my boot drive? Though I'm exporting to 4 other internal drives, not the desktop, or boot drive, these have around 4TB of free space. I couldn't open CT7Pro projects at all, they'd just crash! I had to delete another 50GB of files and applications to finish 6 exports, now I have 6GB free space, so I can't really do any more CT7Pro exports!? I'm not sure why CT7Pro is using my boot drive for temp/cache files and not deleting them after exports and I can't find the files it's creating so I can delete them... it's weird? I'm waiting to hear back from Reallusion on an answer, where are those files and how do I free up around 150GB of space that CT7Pro has used up on my boot drive?

The other problems I've had are most of the exports result in dead Quicktimes, with zero file size, with a file near it (same date/time) with a weird name and the file size of what I'd expect for the Quicktime, which is not a quicktime. I mean like I have to do 20 or so exports until one works!

The other thing is, my timeline is just under 4 minutes long and CT7Pro will export a Quicktime of that same time length, but only about 1.5 minutes plays, the rest is frozen, so I have to do multiple exports the timeline....

And... not that this is a real problem, but would be a nice feature... I can't modify the templates that come with CT7Pro, like I just wanted the top teeth to be used in my animation, but I can't export and change the teeth and reimport... So, I have to create new teeth, which is not a real big deal, but it would be nice if I could select to only use the top, or bottom only of the teeth. I would like to be able to export the CT7Pro template graphics, change them and reimport... that would be helpful.

And.... when I import a actor image, the eye holes with alpha work, but mouth holes with alpha don't work? I punch holes in my Arnold actors eyes and mouth and used the CT7Pro Eye template, that worked, but for the mouth, I just get a white mouth, rather than the teeth? So I had to do a workaround to get the teeth work, or they would have been much better (plus I'm stuck with the bottom teeth, which I couldn't disable in the time I had).

There are lots of other things... but I still like CT7Pro...

Thanks...

Robert Moore
JOHNAVATAR.com
Santa Monica, CA 90402
Email: JohnAvatar@JohnAvatar.com

I have read you posting these same issues across a half-dozen threads. I am on a mac (os10.10) and do not see the issues you describe.

I export PNG sequence to keep the alpha channel. Have to match up the audio in post, but I generally remix the audio anyway since I use unfiltered "dry" audio for the lipsync.

I see CrazyTalk has added more QT export options, but I have not tried them. Video export use to be limited in CT to only a few options (none had alpha channel) so I just adjusted to the PNG sequence method.... Maybe that would solve some of your mov length issues?

I export with the background set to "Actor Only", so the Quicktime only has the Actor with alpha. I use the Quicktime.mov, ProRes 4444 export option and that works, but with problems. The alpha is fine and the audio looks in sync, the exports just don't always work, the boot drive gets used up and some Quicktime movies aren't complete.

The audio sync looks pretty good, about what I would expect.

I bring the Quicktime.mov export into Final Cut Pro 7.03 and edit with FCP7.

I didn't treat the audio at all.

For my other projects I will be doing things to the audio, but for this one the audio was fine.

I didn't see PNG sequence as an option.

I was just looking at a CT7Pro training video and like you said, it does show the image export tab, to export an image sequence. I'm not at my system right now and will look tonight.

I don't know then about the audio, other than I'll have to sync it in Final Cut Pro 7, which I can do, but maybe that's where people have problems with audio sync? Does the audio track get export with an image sequence export? I'll find out tonight. I'll use Quicktime to import a PNG image sequence and add the audio track, that should work? Or add and sync the audio track in FCP7.

The method I used, of the single Quicktime.mov file export, contains the audio. This is a very simple method.

I'm thinking though, that an image sequence, like you said, won't eat up my boot drive.

I sent an email to Reallusion tech support and haven't heard back, regarding my boot drive and other issues I've encountered.

Thank you.

You know what's really weird is that this forum is like a ghost town!

Where's the activity?

I'm thinking there's only a few dozen owners of CT7Pro!?!???

I recall (in a totally different program) trying to create HD video files of high bandwidth and the movies kept mysteriously failing after an amount of video time, not exactly the same each time but near enough. Ultimately, I realized my external harddrive which I had formatted to be compatible with 32bit Windows as well as Mac, was not able to write files larger than a few GB - it was a very specific filesize limit, they weren't the same time but they were all the same filesize.... Any videos larger than that size were cut off or corrupted.

I'm not trying to speculate what is causing your bug, or contradict what you are experiencing. It could be CrazyTalk. With me it was my harddrive formating (something *I did* deliberately because... reasons...LOL) but anyway suggests to me that the problem is something to do with a memory or storage limit -- who knows, maybe even a RAM limit which maybe is kicking in some sort of virtual disc RAM memory leak which is devouring your boot drive....

I first saw ProRes4444 this morning, so it is a new-ish feature.... 4444 seems overkill for this kind of stuff. Compare your before and after images in photoshop or similar, I don't think the end results are going to benefit from serious color grading.... I would like to use Animation codec ("Lossless" in the QT menu) but last I checked CT didn't write the alpha. Might be worth checking again since the export options have been updated....

Thank You Holly Wetcircuit...

ProRes 4444 is the codec that CT7Pro uses to export a Quicktime Movie and retain alpha, if you want to do an export and only have the "Actor" with no background, you use ProRes 4444. I would prefer Animation codec as well, though that might actually result in a larger file!

I've been a Producer/Editor and Expert Engineer for Film/TV Production and Post Production for many years.... I work with the major studios and TV networks on their Film/TV Projects.... Using all of the newest technology and lots of different systems for every project, I build very large to very small production and post systems.

I know this stuff and deal with it daily.

My primary computer I'm using with CT7Pro is a MacPro 12 core, with 8 Gig of Memory, a 500GB SSD Boot Drive and 4 other internal drives of 1TB and 2TB... it is a very powerful, very loaded MacPro. Most of the other 4 drives is free space, so I have approaching 4TB of free space to work with and the boot drive did have over 100GB of free space. ONe thing magical, yesterday when I boot up the MacPro and after starting up CT7Pro, the boot drive showed it had 73GB of free space? (the day before it had 6GB... and before I started using CT7Pro it had over 100GB free space), so it looks like CT7Pro freed up some space (very confusing)?

I use that MacPro daily on editing projects and never have issues.

I export from Final Cut Pro 7 much large files size (at least 10 times larger) Quicktimes to the same hard drives and never, never have any issues with file size, or Quicktime ProRes files.

The problems are clearly with CT7Pro, no question about it.

But, it's not really a big deal, I realize CT7Pro is an alpha product now, or it would perform much better. With my background I can do what I need, it would just be nicer if CT7PRo were more dependable and that all exports would work 100% of the time, rather than 5% of the time and only a third of the timeline is export... I need 100% accurate export and always 100% of the timeline to be export... that would be much better, I could get much more work done.