Storyboard Pro 7.0.1 Release Notes

Here is the list of changes in Storyboard Pro 7.0.1, build 17.10.1.15476 (2020-01-31):

Animatic

Feature Description
Drag & drop panels in Animatic Editing Mode

It is now possible to drag and drop panels at any specific position in the timeline while Animatic Editing Mode is enabled.

Captions

Feature Description
Background colour

The Text Formatting toolbar and the Format Captions dialog now have a Background Colour button. This allows you to select a background colour for the text in your project’s captions.

NOTE The background colour appears around the text, like this, and does affect the colour of the whole caption field.
Clear formatting

The Text Formatting toolbar and the Format Captions dialog now have a Clear Formatting button which removes all font, font size, bold, italic, underline, text colour and background colour formatting from the selected captions. It does not however affect the alignment of the text.

Scripting

Feature Description
Close project and open another

The new closeSceneAndOpenOffline() method of the scene class will close the current project and open another.

NOTE This method is named as such because it is also used in the Harmony Stand Alone scripting interface to close a scene and open another.
Lock and unlock layers The new setLayerLock() and getLayerLock() methods of the LayerManager class allow you to lock or unlock layers as well as to check whether a specific layer is locked.
Export progress signals The exportSceneProgress() and exportFrameProgress() signals of the ExportManager class can be used while exporting your project using the scripting interface. They are triggered every time a scene and a frame are done exporting.
Get the name of an act The new actNameOfScene() method of the StoryboardManager class will return the name of the act in which a given scene occurs.
Check if layer is empty

The isEmpty() method of the LayerManager class now returns true if the user has drawn inside the layer and then erased the artwork. Previously, it would only return true if nothing had ever been drawn in the layer before.

NOTE This change makes the method slightly slower as it requires loading the layer’s drawing file to check if it contains no artwork. Also, please note that the memory used by this method to load the drawing file cannot be freed afterwards.

Enhancements

  • The distance for the pen stabilizer in the Pen Settings toolbar is now set to 20 by default.
  • The state of the Loop Playback option is now saved to your preferences and preserved after closing Storyboard Pro.

Fixed Issues

Stability
  • Memory leak and crash could occur when rendering QuickTime movies on macOS.
  • Crash could occur when exporting a project as Harmony scenes while a 3D model is selected with the Layer Transform tool.
  • Crash could occur when importing an AAF sequence for conformation while the Thumbnail view is displayed.
  • If the Override Rotation, Override Zoom Out or Override Zoom In keyboard shortcut was cleared, the Stage View and the Camera View would get stuck in Rotate, Zoom In or Zoom Out mode.
Project Creation & Saving
  • When using the Save As command, the Save dialog would not always open in the project’s actual location and the default project name would not always match the project’s name.
  • When saving a new version of the project, the old version would remain marked as open which would result in an error message when opening the old version.
  • Scenes could be imported in the reverse order when creating a project from Harmony scenes.
  • It was possible for the user to save a project even if no changes had been made.
Drawing & Layers
  • Copying or duplicating layers inside groups would copy layers inside the group twice, once inside the copied group and once outside the copied group.
  • Scaling or rotating an animation-enabled layer with the Layer Transform tool would not create an animation keyframe.
Storyboard & Animatic
  • It became impossible to draw or manipulate objects in the Stage or Camera view after selecting a sound clip and changing the current frame.
  • It was not possible to select both video and sound clips simultaneously by drawing a rectangle around them with the mouse.
  • When copying and pasting a movie clip with animation keyframes over itself, only the keyframes in the original clip that were not overwritten by the copy of the movie clip would get copied over.
  • When adding a panel in a gap between two panels, if the panel was bigger than the gap, subsequent panels would be offset but not their camera keyframes.
  • Moving a scene between two other scenes caused Storyboard Pro to prompt the user to rename the scene.
  • The Paste command was greyed out when the timeline playhead was in a gap between two panels, making it impossible to paste panels in a gap.
  • It was previously impossible to delete an audio track that was locked.

  • Selecting all panels from a specific point forward by holding Ctrl (Windows) or ⌘ (macOS) + Shift + Alt and clicking on a panel then deleting the selected panels would occasionally delete sound clips outside of the selected range and leave sound clips inside the selected range.

Captions
  • When the Spelling dialog found a misspelled word for which it had no spelling suggestion, the Replace Once and Replace All buttons would be greyed out, even if the user typed in their own replacement word in the Replace With field.
  • Spelling mistakes at the very end of a caption field did not get highlighted by the spell checker.
Import
  • When importing multiple video files that contain audio with the Overwrite Existing Clips option, only one of the video file’s audio streams would get imported.

  • Attempting to import a Windows Media Video (.wmv) file on macOS would cause a progress bar to appear, loop indefinitely and soft-lock the application.

    NOTE Importing WMV files is not supported on macOS.
  • Storyboard Pro only allowed importing TIFF images with the .tif extension, and not with the .tiff extension.
Export
  • The Movie Settings dialog on macOS had an Alpha option, despite Storyboard Pro not supporting the export of movies with transparency.

  • An unclear error message would appear when attempting to export a movie in H.264/MPEG-4 (*.mov) format in a resolution that is not supported by this video encoder. Now, a message explaining the issue appears and prompts the user to export in a supported resolution instead.

    NOTE This video encoder supports resolutions of up to 4096×2304. Each dimension must be a multiple of 16 pixels.
  • When exporting a movie that included an empty space in the timeline with burnt-in scene and panel information, the scene and panel information for the next panel would be burnt-in during the empty space section.
  • Importing an AAF sequence for conformation would fail if it only contained audio tracks.
  • When exporting a PDF in a vertical layout with the Expand Panels and the Spread Captions & Sketch options, the captions for panels with long horizontal camera movements (which get printed to a row below the thumbnail) would bleed outside of their respective caption fields.
Project Management
  • The buttons in the Project Management view would disappear when switching to another view then back to the Project Management view when using the classic (light) stylesheet.
  • When extracting a project from another project in Storyboard Pro Packed Files (.sbpz) format via the scripting interface, the extracted project would be linked to the original project’s cache rather than the actual project file.
  • No error information would be written to the report field of the Merge Modified Panels dialog box if the merge operation failed.
User Interface
  • Text in the Sequence, Scene, Panel and Duration fields of the PDF Review workspace was cropped in High DPI / Retina mode.
  • The expand and collapse arrows would not appear in the same size in the Library and 3D Graph views, depending on the colour theme used and whether Storyboard Pro was running in normal resolution or in High DPI / Retina mode.