Toon Boom Storyboard Pro 6 Release Notes

Storyboard Pro now features video tracks, in which you can add image or video clips to display them in your animatic.

Video tracks can be placed above or below the storyboard track, to make its clips display over or underneath the artwork in your animatic. Image and video clips can span over several panels or scenes and be cued and clipped at any time in the animatic. They can be transformed and animated, just like layers in a panel, but contrary to layers in a panel, they are not affected by camera movements.

For more information, see About Image and Video Clips.

You can search for a sound clip in your animatic by entering part or all of its file name and going through each matching result—see Searching Sound Clips and Find Sound Clips Dialog Box.

The new Stamp tool can be used to stamp one or several drawings into your artwork. You can stamp drawings one at a time or draw strokes with it. The behaviour of the stamp tool when drawing strokes can be customized in many ways—see About the Stamp Tool and Stamp Tool Properties.

The Brush tool now has the same texture drawing capabilities when used on vector layers as when used on bitmap layers—see Creating a Textured Brush and Brush Tool Properties.

The Centerline Editor tool allows you to manipulate brush strokes, whether solid or textured, by their centreline, giving you better control over their shape than the Contour Editor—see About the Centerline Editor and Centerline Editor Tool Properties.

The Contour Editor, Envelope and Perspective tools can deform the texture in textured vector brush strokes.

The Polyline tool, which was available in Harmony, has been added to Storyboard Pro. With this tool, you can draw segmented lines or shapes by creating each point composing the line, allowing you to draw shapes with precision. The lines created with the Polyline tool can be straight or curvilinear—see About the Polyline Tool and Polyline Tool Properties.

The Perspective tool can now be used in either Perspective or Lattice mode. The Perspective mode deforms the drawing by simulating a perspective effect, whereas the Lattice mode simply deforms the drawing to make it fit the shape of the control box—see About the Perspective Tool Modes and Perspective Tool Properties.

A Render Scene Layout Panel option was added to the Panel tab of the PDF Profile dialog. When enabled, each scene that has a camera movement will have special "layout" thumbnail added before the thumbnails for its panels. The layout thumbnail contains the camera movement for the entire scene as well as the artwork of the first panel in the scene—see PDF Profile Dialog Box.

The Display Camera Mask option was added to the Panel tab of the PDF Profile dialog. When enabled, a mask covers the part of the panel that is not covered by the camera frames or the camera's trajectory. This means that only the artwork that is covered by the camera will be visible in the thumbnails. The colour of the mask can be customized—see PDF Profile Dialog Box.

It is now possible to configure some of the rendering parameters of the Write node when exporting Harmony scenes, namely the location, prefix and image format of rendered frames—see Exporting Harmony Scenes and Export to Harmony Dialog Box.

When exporting over existing Harmony scenes, you now have the option to overwrite all Storyboard Pro scenes with conflicting names simultaneously, instead of having to specify to overwrite each conflicting scene one at a time.

When importing a sequence into your Storyboard Pro project, you can elect to not import the panels, and only import the audio tracks or the captions instead.

With this option available, you can export a soundtrack composed in a video editing software into an XML or AAF sequence, then import it into your Storyboard Pro project without affecting your storyboard panels.

For more information, see Importing an Edited XML or AAF Sequence back for Conformation and Conformation Import Project Dialog Box.

By default, when adding transitions, the length of the project shortens by the length of the transition. This is because a transition causes the next scene to start playing before the current scene finishes playing. With this option enabled, adding a transition between two scenes will automatically extend the length of both scenes by half the length of the transition, allowing the project to remain the same length.

This preference was added to the General tab of the Preferences dialog—see General Preferences.

By default, when Auto Tracking Mode is enabled, any change made to a panel will activate tracking for that panel. With this option enabled, making changes to a panel's captions will not activate tracking for that panel.

This preference was added to the General tab of the Preferences dialog—see General Preferences.

The frame class, which allows you to check and change the current frame, was created. It contains the following methods: current, setCurrent and moveFrames.

The following methods were added to the LayerManager class: isShared, isEmpty and mergeLayers.

Additionally, the getLayerSelection method was added to the SelectionManager class.

The setPanelColor and getPanelColor methods were added to the StoryboardManager class.

Fixed issue where exporting a dynamic brush preset containing multiple drawings and importing it under a different user account would only import the first drawing of the dynamic brush.

Fixed the size of the following user interface elements in High DPI / Retina Display mode:

• The Zoom drop-down in the Stage, Camera, Top and Side views
• Tthe Browse button in the Split Storyboard dialog in High DPI / Retina Display mode.