Editing Events

This article is an introduction to editing events using SGX Director. For a quick look at editing, see the SGX Production Tools: Quick-start Video (at around 4:00).

Reprocessing

While editing an event, any changes that could impact animation – such as edits to transcript and metadata or changes to the processing configuration – are not automatically reflected in the animation. The animation must be explicitly updated by reprocessing the event.

To determine whether the animation in the event is up-to-date with the latest changes to the event sequences, check the Animation Updated field in the Inspector (see Event Properties). If the current state is “No”, then the event definitely needs processing.

Event reprocessing may be performed using one of the standard event processing approaches:

interactively on the currently loaded event (see Processing Events)
in a batch process (see Batch Processing), choosing the option to Process existing events

Once processing is finished, the event will be up to date with any edits to the metadata or changes to processing configuration. If the event is already bound to a visualizer, it can be immediately re-played to see the new animation.

Editing the transcript

Transcripts enhance the quality of lip sync (see Input Options), and can also carry behavior markup. At times you may want to edit the transcript, either to improve its accuracy or edit markup. See Transcript View on how to edit the transcript and Transcription Guidelines on best practices.

Adding a transcript

If an event does not already contain a transcript, you can add one. There are two ways to do that:

Load the transcript from a .txt file using File > Open or the shortcut Ctrl+O.
Create a new, empty transcript using File > New > Transcript or the shortcut Ctrl+T, and then type into it what you hear in the audio.

Editing metadata

There are two types of editable metadata sequences: Categorical Time Series and Irregular Time Series. Guidance for editing these types of sequences is found in the following two articles:

For descriptions of the various metadata sequences and the impacts of editing them, see the SGX Concepts article Metadata.

Discarding metadata edits

After editing metadata, you may want to discard your edits and re-generate the original metadata. The way to do that is by deleting the edited sequences and reprocessing. There are two ways to delete sequences:

Delete all metadata at once, using Edit > Clear Metadata. This reduces the event down to its input alone (audio and transcript).
Remove sequences individually by hitting the 'X' control in the title bar:

Editing the character

As well as editing events in SGX Director, one may also edit the Character Control File used to process the events. Specifically, one may edit the muscles – poses and dynamic properties – and behavior modes of the character. This will lead to systematic changes in the animation produced with this resource. Character Control Files are edited in SGX Studio.

If you make changes to the muscles or behavior modes of the character, first save the Character Control File in SGX Studio, and then in SGX Director, select File > Reload > Resources. This will reload all character resources from disk.

Below is a typical interactive workflow involving making changes to the character while reviewing the impact of these changes on animation:

Load a Character Control File in both SGX Director and SGX Studio.
Load events in SGX Director and bind them to SGX Studio.
Play the events to see the animation.
Identify some aspects of the performance – e.g., muscle movements or expressions – that seem systematically wrong.
Make changes to those aspects in SGX Studio, and save the character control file.
Reload resources in SGX Director.
Reprocess the events.
Go to step 3 and iterate as needed.