Storyboard Pro 7.0.0 Release Notes

It is now possible to add horizontal and vertical guides to the Stage View and the Camera View. Alignment guides can be used with the Layer Transform tool as well as various drawing tools such as the Select, Contour Editor, Perspective, Brush, Pencil, Rectangle, Ellipse and Line tools, to help you position elements and draw along their axes.

You can add the Alignment Guides toolbar to your workspace by either:

• Right-clicking on any toolbar and select Alignment Guides.
• Selecting Windows > Toolbars > Alignment Guides from the top menu.

You can also add alignment guides by selecting View > Alignment Guides from the top menu.

You can manipulate alignment guides using the Layer Transform or the Select tool. You can also make your drawing tool snap to alignment guides by clicking on the Snapping button in the Tool Properties view and, in the pop-up menu, select Snap to Alignment Guides.

For more information, see About Alignment Guides.

The brush presets for the Brush tool have been updated.

• Solid vector brushes are now sorted by size, starting from 5 and going to 25.

  

• Fine Pencil, Tilting Pencil and Chisel Tip brushes have been added.

  

• Charcoal has been updated, and its alternative, Charcoal Pencil, has been replaced with Dark Charcoal.

  

The new pen stabilizer can help you draw smooth, stable lines by stabilizing your drawing strokes as you draw, without having to smooth them afterwards. It works by letting you draw a stroke without generating a line immediately, instead it starts generating a line that trails behind your mouse cursor or tablet pen once it reaches a certain length. By trailing behind your stroke, it can smooth out the flaws in your drawing gesture and generate a smooth stroke.

There are two different stabilizing methods:

• Average: Storyboard Pro calculates the average direction of all of your mouse or pen gestures between the end of the actual drawing stroke and the current position of your mouse cursor or pen tip, and extends the stroke in this average direction, effectively evening out jitter and rounding sharp turns.

  

• Pulled String: When you start drawing a stroke, Storyboard Pro positions the drawing tool where your stroke starts. As you move the mouse or tablet pen, the drawing tool remains in that position, but a "string" appears, linking your drawing tool to your mouse cursor or pen tip.

  

  Once a certain maximum length is reached, the string pulls the drawing tool in the direction of your mouse cursor or tablet pen.

  

The distance between your mouse cursor or tablet pen and the stroke can be customized.

This feature can be enabled by adding the Pen Settings toolbar to your workspace, and selecting either Average or Pulled String in the toolbar's drop-down menu—see About Pen Stabilization.

If you have a tablet and pen that support reading the tilt angle of your pen, you can configure the Brush tool to use this information and draw with a tilted tip. A tilted tip will be stretched or projected at the angle in which you tilt your tablet pen, simulating the effect of drawing with a tilted pencil or felt pen.

This feature can be used by adjusting the Pen Tilt Sensitivity parameter in the Brush Properties dialog—see Creating a Solid Brush, Configuring a Textured Brush Tip and Brush Tool Properties.

If you have a tablet and pen that supports reading the rotation angle of your pen, you can configure the Brush tool to use this information so that the rotation of your brush tip is based on how you rotate your tablet pen.

This feature can be used by enabling the Use Pen Rotation property in the Brush Properties dialog—see Creating a Solid Brush, Configuring a Textured Brush Tip and Brush Tool Properties.

Storyboard Pro now allows you to edit and customize the curve by which it processes the amount of pressure you put on your pen tablet to calculate the thickness, flow or opacity of your brush or pencil lines.

The Pen Pressure Feel dialog can be accessed by adding the Pen Settings toolbar to your workspace, then clicking on the Pen Pressure Feel button. For more information, see About Pen Pressure Curve Customization and Pen Pressure Feel Dialog Box.

The Select and Cutter tools now have an Easy Drag mode. When enabled, you can click anywhere inside the selection control box to drag the selection. By default, you have to click inside the artwork, which may be difficult when manipulating line art.

To enable Easy Drag mode, click on the Easy Drag button in the Tool Properties view—see Select Tool Properties and Cutter Tool Properties.

In the Tool Properties view, if you set the selection mode for the current tool to either Lasso or Marquee, the mode will be automatically saved in your preferences and will persist after you close and relaunch Storyboard Pro.

NOTE The selection mode can be set when using the Transform, Select, Cutter, Contour Editor, Pencil Editor, Perspective or Envelope tools. Setting the selection mode for any of these tools will change the selection mode for all of these tools.

The Eraser and now has a Tip Style option in the Tool Properties view. This option allows you to select which style of tips will be left over when you erase part of a pencil line.

Several new drawing guides have been added:

• The Ruler allows you to position and rotate a simple straight axis, and then draw a line along that axis, like a regular ruler.

  

• The Isometric Perspective guide helps you draw lines that are parallel to one of three axes: The x-axis, the y-axis and the z-axis. The angle of each axis can be customized as needed.

  This type of pseudo-perspective, also referred to as parallel projection, is often used in 2D games, computer graphics and schematics to depict 3D objects and environments without using any actual perspective, foreshortening or 3D rendering. In 2D animation, it is often used to draw long panning backgrounds from a low or high angle.

  

• The 3-Point Perspective (Horizontal Pan) guide helps you draw horizontally panoramic backgrounds, with curvilinear horizontal lines. A vanishing point is placed in the middle of the horizon line, to help draw lines on the z-axis, and two vanishing points are placed on the horizon line outside of the camera field, to define the curve of horizontal lines. Vertical lines are made perpendicular to the horizon line.

  This is useful for drawing backgrounds meant to be panned over horizontally. Panning the camera horizontally over a background drawn with a 3-Point Perspective (Horizontal Pan) guide will simulate a rotation of the camera on the y-axis.

  

• The 3-Point Perspective (Vertical Pan) guide helps you draw vertically panoramic backgrounds, with curvilinear vertical lines. A vanishing point is placed in the middle of the horizon line, to help draw lines on the z-axis, and two vanishing points are placed above and below the horizon line, outside of the camera field, to define the curve of vertical lines. Horizontal lines are made parallel to the horizon line.

  This is useful for drawing backgrounds meant to be panned over vertically. Panning the camera vertically over a background drawn with a 3-Point Perspective (Vertical Pan) guide will simulate a vertical rotation of the camera on the x-axis.

  

• The 4-Point Continuous Perspective guide is very similar to the 3 Point Perspective (Horizontal Pan) guide, except that it is designed to help draw full 360° panoramic backgrounds.

  This guide uses 5 vanishing points. When drawing a horizontal line, it is curved by arching over one of the vanishing points and reaching down to the two surrounding vanishing points. This creates a perspective effect where each vanishing point represents one of the cardinal points, except that the leftmost and the rightmost points represent the same cardinal point, effectively creating a looping background. Backgrounds made with the 4-Point Continuous Perspective guide can be looped horizontally to simulate a full rotation of the camera on the y-axis.

  

• The 4-Point Perspective (Vertical Pan) is a lot like the 2-Point Perspective guide, except that its vertical lines are curvilinear, so it can be used to make vertically panning backgrounds. Two vanishing points are on the horizon line, outside of the camera field, to help draw lines on the x-axis and the z-axis, and two vanishing points are placed above and below the camera field to define the curve of the vertical lines.

  This is useful for drawing backgrounds meant to be panned over vertically, in which cuboid objects are seen from an angle.

  

• The 5-Point Perspective (Fish Eye) guide helps you draw backgrounds that are curvilinear on both the x-axis and the y-axis. It has one central vanishing point on the horizon line, from which lines on the z-axis are drawn, two vanishing points at the extremities of its horizon line, to define the curve of horizontal lines, and two vanishing points above and below the horizon line, to define the curve of the vertical lines.

  This guide can be used to draw backgrounds with a fisheye-style wide angle lens effect. It can also be used to draw backgrounds that are meant to be panned in various directions.

  

Each guide is available in the Add Guide pop-up menu of the Guides view. For more information, see About Drawing Guides.

If you press and hold the Alt key while using drawing guides, the angle of the guide lines will stop following your mouse cursor and lock in position until you release the Alt key, allowing you to keep the guide lines at the right angle.

By using this feature, you can rework the thickness or length of lines that you are drawing with a guide. It's also useful if you want to draw a dotted line along an axis.

It is now possible to create gaps in your animatic when editing its timing, similarly to editing video clips in a video editing software.

By default, any change you make to your animatic will ripple to subsequent panels so as to avoid leaving gaps in the timeline. If you want to create gaps, you must enable Animatic Editing Mode. This can be done by clicking on the Animatic Editing Mode button in the bottom-left corner of the Timeline view. You can also temporarily toggle Animatic Editing Mode by pressing and holding the Ctrl (Windows) or ⌘ (macOS) key while changing the duration of a panel in the Timeline view.

For more information, see About Animatic Editing Mode.

By default, when you offset panels, sound clips and video clips that are cued during those panels will also be offset to remain synchronized with them.

You can now disable the synchronization of video and sound clips for each video and audio track in your project. When synchronization is disabled for a track, its clips will not offset when you make changes to the timing of your animatic.

To disable synchronization for a track, click on the Sync button next to that track in the Timeline view—see Enabling and Disabling Audio Track Synchronization and Enabling and Disabling Video Track Synchronization.

The Timeline view is now divided in two separate areas:

• The video area, which contains your storyboard track, which has your project's panels, animations and camera movements, as well as all of your project's video tracks.
• The audio area, which contains all of your project's audio tracks.

It is possible to reposition the divider between these two areas and to scroll each area vertically without affecting the other area.

Where you could previously only display the current frame's time code as an overlay in the Stage and Camera views, you can now also display the name (number) of the current scene and the current panel, as well as one type of captions.

You can also customize where this information is displayed, as well as its font, font size and colour.

To display overlays in the Stage and Camera view, click on the Show Overlays button in the toolbar at the bottom of either view.

To customize the types of information displayed in the overlays, as well as how it is displayed, double-click or long-click on Show Overlays and, in the pop-up menu, select Overlay Settings—see Overlay Settings Dialog Box.

When importing a movie file, you can now import its audio stream into your project's audio tracks by checking the Import Audio checkbox in the Import Videos/Images as Clips dialog.

For more information, see About Video Clip Format, Importing Image and Video Clips and Import Videos/Images as Clips Dialog Box.

Storyboard Pro now supports videos with alpha (transparency).

For more information, see About Video Clip Format, Importing Image and Video Clips and Import Videos/Images as Clips Dialog Box.

It is now possible to import WebM files as video clips into your animatic. For more information, see About Video Clip Format.

You can now set the volume for a sound clip without creating a volume keyframe. You can simply click and drag on their volume envelope to adjust their overall volume.

If your sound clip has volume keyframes, you can also click and drag on the segment between two keyframes to offset both keyframes simultaneously.

For more information, see Adjusting Volume and Interpolating the Volume of Sound Clips.

It is possible to add a gain effect to sound clips. To do this, select one or several sound clips, then either:

• Right-click on the selection and select Audio Gain.
• In the top menu, select Clips > Audio Gain.

Gain is different from volume in that it can actually amplify your sound clip. It is applied before the volume is applied. It is possible to select several sound clip and set or offset their gain simultaneously. Hence, if you notice disparities in volume between different sound clips, you can quickly even them out.

Audio Gain is an effect which can be adjusted or undone at any time. It is supported with XML and AAF conformation. This means that if you export your animatic as an XML or AAF sequence for conformation and import the sequence in Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and Avid Media Composer, you can adjust the gain on your sound clip in your video editing software, and import those changes into your Storyboard Pro project.

For more information, see About Volume & Gain, Setting the Audio Gain for Sound Clips and Audio Gain Dialog Box

When setting the volume of a sound clip or of a volume keyframe, the overlay that displays the volume you're setting it to in decibels now displays decimals.

When importing an XML sequence for conformation, Storyboard Pro will check if the sound files linked to your sequence have been changed since they were exported from your project. If changes have been detected, Storyboard Pro will import the new sound files into your Storyboard Pro project.

It is now possible to export a QuickTime Movie (.mov) file without using Apple QuickTime, by instead using a simple H.264 (AVC) encoder.

To do this, when using the Export to Movie or the Export to EDL/XML/AAF dialog, select H.264/MPEG-4 (*.mov) in the Movie Format drop-down. This format is available on both Windows and macOS, even if Apple QuickTime is not installed.

Movies exported using this option have a video stream encoded with the H.264 (AVC) video codec, and an audio stream in PCM format.

For more information, see Exporting a Movie, Exporting an EDL, AAF or XML Sequence, Export to Movie Dialog Box and Export to EDL/AAF/XML Dialog Box.

It is now possible to save multiple versions of your storyboard without having to save your entire project as a copy.

By selecting File > Save as New Version from the top menu, you can save your project as a different project file, but inside the same project folder.

Each project version will preserve their own animations, timing, video tracks, audio tracks and clip placements. However, the different versions of a single project will share the same drawing files, video files and audio files, as well as the same palette.

Project versions will be saved as different .sboard files inside the project directory. To open a specific project version, simply open the corresponding project file.

You can also save different project versions when working with Storyboard Packed Files (.sbpz). If you open a Storyboard Packed File that contains several project versions, you will be prompted to select which version you want to open.

For more information, see Saving Several Versions of a Project and Deleting Old Project Versions.

The new Project Management view allows you to keep a list of all the projects that were created by splitting your project or by extracting parts of your project.

When you split your project, or when you extract smaller projects from your project, you can check the Link extracted project at the bottom of the Split Storyboard or Extract Storyboard dialog to add the smaller projects to the list in the Project Management view.

This list displays the name as well as the full path to each project. It also indicates whether or not the project was modified, as well as if the project cannot be found in the location where it was extracted.

This view also allows you to remap linked projects that were moved and to remove linked projects that were deleted, and to link other projects to yours. It also provides a quick access to all the commands that are available in File > Project Management in the top menu.

For more information, see Project Management View and About Linked Projects.

It is now possible to select your preferred user interface language in the Preferences dialog.

Storyboard Pro currently supports English, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese and Spanish. In previous versions, Storyboard Pro would always launch in the language of your operating system if supported, or in English otherwise. By setting this preference, you can make Storyboard Pro launch in a specific supported language regardless of the language of your operating system.

You can change this preference in the Global UI tab of the Preferences dialog.

The Increment name by preference allows you to configure how new panels are numbered.

For example, if you enable this preference and set it to 10 (the default value), panels in a new scene will be named 10, 20, 30, and so on when created in sequence.

Then, if you create a new panel between two existing panels, the new panel will be named by using the number between the numbers assigned to the two neighbouring panels, rounded down. For example, if you create a panel between panel 10 and panel 20, this panel will be named 15. If you create another panel between panel 10 and 15, this panel will be named 12. When this option is disabled, if you create a panel between two existing panels, the new panel will be named based on the number of the previous panel + 1, and subsequent panels will be renamed to keep their numbers in sequence.

This preference is available in the Naming tab of the Preferences dialog.

A new panel naming rule has been added.

This new panel is very similar to an existing panel naming rule, it uses letters instead of digits to number panels, in the following way:

A ... Z, ZA ... ZZ, ZZA ... ZZZ, ZZZA ...

However, while the existing naming rule added Zs at the beginning of the panel's name to count how many times it reached Z, this new rule indicates the amount of Zs it reached using a number, in this way:

A ... Z, ZA ... ZZ, 2ZA ... 2ZZ, 3ZA ...

Hence, panel names always use at most two letters, and are otherwise preceded by a number.

You can select this naming rule in the Naming tab of the Preferences dialog, in the Panel Auto-increment Rule drop-down.

The new Automatically Add Leading Zeroes preference, available in the Naming tab of the Preferences dialog, allows you to create panels with a specific amount of digits in their name, by adding leading zeroes as needed.

For example, if you set the minimum amount of characters for panel names to 3, the first panel of a scene will be named 001.

The Shortcuts tab of the Preferences dialog is now its own dialog, the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.

To access this dialog box, in the top menu, select Edit (Windows) or Storyboard Pro 7 (macOS) > Keyboard Shortcuts.

It is now possible to create your own keyboard shortcut sets. You can also export your keyboard shortcut sets as XML files and use them as backups or share them with project collaborators.

You can create, export and import keyboard shortcut sets using the New, Load... and Save... buttons at the top of the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.

It is now possible to export your preferences as XML files, and use them as backups or share them with project collaborators.

You can export and import preferences using the new Load... and Save... buttons at the top of the Preferences dialog.

For more information, see Exporting Preferences and Importing Preferences.

The Storyboard Pro package for macOS now only contains a single application.

You can launch License Wizard by selecting Storyboard Pro 7 > Storyboard Pro Tools > License Wizard from the top menu.

The way Storyboard Pro is packaged for macOS no longer triggers the operating system's security mechanisms. Hence, it is no longer required to right-click on Storyboard Pro, select Open and authorize the application as a user with administrative privileges to be able to run Storyboard Pro. You will be able to launch Storyboard Pro as soon as it is copied to your Applications folder.

In the past, scripts packaged with Storyboard Pro were all automatically copied to your preferences folder, in the same location as your custom scripts. Now, scripts packaged with Storyboard Pro are only copied to your preferences if you make modifications to them. Otherwise, they are stored and executed from the Storyboard Pro installation folder.

This solves several problems:

• The scripts folder in your user preferences is now reserved for your custom scripts and are no longer cluttered with Storyboard Pro scripts.
• In previous versions, when installing a patch update, Storyboard Pro would not overwrite the scripts in your user preferences with the updated scripts, as this would risk overwriting one of your user scripts. This is no longer a problem, except in the rare case where you happen to have edited a script packaged with Storyboard Pro which was updated in a patch update.
• You can now easily restore the original version of a packaged Storyboard Pro script after having made changes to it.

For more information, see Editing a Script Packaged with Storyboard Pro, Restoring a Storyboard Pro Script and Script Editor View.

You can now set a custom location in which to store scripts. To do this, you must set the TOONBOOM_GLOBAL_SCRIPT_LOCATION environment variable to the location where you want to store scripts. The scripts in this location will be available in the Script Editor alongside scripts that are packaged with Storyboard Pro and scripts in your user preferences—see Storing Scripts in a Custom Directory.

It is now possible to export your project as an EDL, AAF or XML sequence through scripting. You can do this by using the exportToNLE() method of the ExportManager class.

The setOneMoviePerPanel() method was also added to the ExportManager class to support exporting one movie file per panel.

For more information refer to the Storyboard Pro Scripting Reference.

The following methods were added to the scene class to convert the coordinate for a single axis from field coordinates to OpenGL coordinates, and from OpenGL to field coordinates: toOGLX(), toOGLY(), toOGLZ(), fromOGLX(), fromOGLY() and fromOGLZ()—see Storyboard Pro Scripting Reference.