Everyone's familiar with the storyboarding process as it relates to film production. It helps a producer and director bring a screenplay to life. But have you ever thought about how storyboarding could streamline editing and post-production? Imagine creating a visual outline to guide your editing, before you even start collecting footage. Imagine a full-length animatic, complete with music, right in your NLE timeline - to overlay footage onto, making constructing a scene a snap. Imagine creating animatic slug scenes from your own images or from a library of supplied images to round out your unfinished sequences.

All of this is possible using PowerProduction StoryBoard Artist. With Storyboard Artist, an editor no longer has to screen unfinished sequences with ‘shot missing' or ‘scene missing' slates. Instead the editor can create animatics to import into their NLE timeline. Here is how to use Storyboard Artist to create an animatic slug to fill in your unfinished timeline:

1. Launch StoryBoard Artist and create a background for your first shot by clicking on a category in the Library windows on the right. A selection of images in that category will pop up in a new window. When you click on an image, it will automatically be added to your first frame. You can move and scale the image in your timeline by dragging on the points in the corners of the images. Next, choose characters and props in the same manner.



You can also import images to use as backgrounds, characters, or props. Select Import from the File menu. Choose your photos or drawings for backgrounds, characters, and props and they will automatically appear in the frame.

2. Go to the Timeline menu and choose Open Timeline. Adjust the length of the frame you just created by dragging the edge of it to the left or right.

3. Next you can pan and zoom through this shot by going to the Main tool window and choosing Pan and Zoom. A green frame automatically forms around the edge. When you click and drag your cursor a red frame appears in the center. The green frame indicates where the ‘camera' will start in the zoom and the red frame indicates where it will end. Drag on the corners of the red frame to resize it - this makes the ‘camera' zoom in further - and move the focal point around by clicking and dragging on the red frame's edges.

4. Create a new frame by selecting New Frame from the Frame menu or pressing Control-M. Repeat the previous steps to create additional shots.

5. If you'd like to complete your animatic by adding voiceover, music, dialog, or sound effects, start by moving the cursor onto one of the four audio tracks in the lower half of the timeline. Then, select Add Sound from the Timeline menu and select your audio files in the Add Sound pop-up window. When you select an audio file, it is automatically dropped onto the timeline, and you can adjust its placement in the track by dragging it with the cursor. A waveform is automatically generated for easy syncing of sound with frames.



6. Preview your sequence by hitting the space bar. If you're satisfied and would like to see your NLE sequence's holes filled in with an animatic, choose Export under the File menu and select QuickTime. Save your QuickTime animatic and import it into your NLE. Alternatively, you may export to XML format for direct import into Apple Final Cut Pro as well as Avid NLEs.