I was wondering what kind of method people use when they approach lip sync. I had a look at Magpie today and while it looks very effective I am concerned that doing lipsync this way may result in a somewhat stale animation. How would you reccomend one goes about this, use Magpie to do the base lip sync, then go through the animation and add extra touches to the poses, to add more character. I’d like to hear what others think on this issue.
Gazzaden
well, in animations, i think it depends on how close to the person you are. if you are zoomed up on them, you should be very careful, and try to make it look like they are actually saying the words.
if it is a fair distance, then just move it up and down 
i haven’t done much lipsync, but the easiest way IMO is rotoscoping. i tried once with footage i produced myself, and it worked fast and good. of couse you’ll need the proper setup (RVK’s or bones), but once you have it it’s easy.
Some handsome devil wrote a tutorial about lipsync with blender
and magpie:
http://blenderchar.weirdhat.com/lipsynctute/
It’s a bit out of date, so replace any mention of curve editting
by using those great RVK sliders. Also, since there is sound
in the sequence editor, in theory the magpie program isn’t
needed at all.
Chris
so basicly what you are saying is, it’s totally useless tutorial 
but, you are right, the author looks fantastic!
my advice would be first to simply make the basic mouth expressions you need… then, load the sound clip into sequencer, and then, open the RVK sliders Hos here pointed out, and then pull and push the sliders and hit alt-a all the time, and again sliders and alt-a and sliders and… well, until you are happy… it takes time, it can be frustrating, but once you see your creation talking, it’s worth the trouble.
.b
Well, I would say ‘mostly useless’ … the technique described in
the tutorial still works, but should be considered ‘The Hard Way’
to do it, since some genius invented the RVK sliders.
I think there might be some stuff in the manual about this stuff
… not sure though.
Chris
Answered this question once before, and here’s a copy-paste of the brief description, just for convenience:
Add an audio strip in the audio timeline, enable Sync and Scrub. Build your RVK’s. Go into the Actions window. Here you can scrub back and forth over the frames, setting RVK keys with sliders as you hear the audio live in Blender. It’s really easier that it sounds.
Results can be seen in the video at the bottom of this page:
http://www.harkyman.com/audition.html
I gave up on bone deformation for lips, because it’s just too fiddly. I have since embraced the way of the RVK (come up with a Japanese name for this somebody please! The enlightenment is simply religious, and I need a name for this feeling) and I get much better results. I create all the phonemes as seen in the preston bliar book (see following site: http://www.garycmartin.com/phoneme_examples.html) and then load up the sound file as described above. I then animate using the IPO curves for each phoneme key until I have lip synch.
This only works for the mouth, but I animate the rest of the head with armatures - eyebrows and eyes are best done this way. The end result give you a fantastic animation in which you can tweak the squash-and-stretch by scaling your head bone, and dipping your IPO for each phoneme below and above their maximum and minimum.