Audio Waveform in my Timeline?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi everyone!

I’m looking at animating a character using some audio for my lip syncing.

I’m new to Blender so I wanted to ask what the best workflow is for viewing your Audio’s Waveform while you animate?

I’m used to Maya and being able to see the Audio’s Waveform in the timeline as I animate, so as I’m scrubbing through I can see my keys on top of the Waveform. Seeing the keys on top of the waveform makes it much easier for me to time my animations.

The workflow I have at the moment is to have 2 Editor windows on top of each other in Blender; the Timeline and Video Sequencer.

I’ve set up my Sound Strips to look like Waveforms and added some keys in my Timeline.
I’ve tried to resize my Video Sequencer so as I’m scrubbing through my Timeline the Waveform is in the same place, but this method doesn’t work great because the Video Sequencer is so easy to accidentally move and resize.

While I’m on frame 11 in the picture example below, the Playhead is in line in both Editors, but on frame 37 it’s way off, so it’s more difficult to see where my keys are in correspondence to my audio. This is a more extreme example but easier to try and explain this way.

waveforms
waveforms1611×916 372 KB

What’s the best workaround for this, if any?
Is there a way of resizing both Editors so they stay the same size as I’m scrubbing through?
Is there a way of having the waveform visible in the timeline like it is in Maya?

Thanks in advance for any advice! :slight_smile:

2

Unfortunately Blender doesn’t have the waveform-in-the-timeline feature, and there’s no convenient way of making those two separate windows line up perfectly the way you want (it can be done in python but that’s probably more time-consuming than doing it by hand).

My method is simply to use markers to label the frames of each word or sentence. Create the markers in the Video Editor and they’ll show up in the timeline for the same scene.

3

Thanks for the reply @Rocketman ! I was afraid that might be the case :upside_down_face:

I didn’t think of using Markers though so I’ll try that method. Thanks again!

4

someone made an addon for it:

2 Likes
5

Thanks you so much for the link! This looks great!