What is AniComp?

AniComp is the central Animatic construction tool. It allows collections of images, from various sources to be browsed and arranged into scenes upon an Animatic time line, quickly and easily. Various frame transitions and effects may then be applied to items upon the time line, and arranged and timed either visually, or numerically as appropriate. An internal preview window allows the author to see results as the current Animatic develops.

AniComp provides the core system for arranging an Animatic. AniComp works with Ardour an open source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to handle its audio, and Jack a low latency audio server for audio visual synchronization. We have worked closely with the primary author of both, to extend Ardour to include an image based track. This provides AniComp with a powerful DAW, and all the features that come with it, for professional quality audio, and a visual time line of the audio against the visual frames of the Animatic.

At any point within the development of an Animatic within AniComp, the Animatic may be exported to an external data file suitable for reading by the client side player. This data file can be made available to remote co-authors, funding bodies or potential investors for viewing.

Extensible

AniComp is intended as an extendable system. We have aimed to design a flexible set of core components that may be easily extended to include such features an animator, may require, rather than concentrate on neat but unstructured effects from the start. Now that many of the core components are in place, we can start adding additional efefcts and features.