What StoryLiner Does and Doesn’t Do

StoryLiner is more than a tool, it is a framework and a philosophy.

It has been designed to have a “scalable footprint” integration in your workflow. In other words, whether it is for a small single user/single file project or a large scale production, it is up to you to define if you want it to be non-intrusive or at the contrary to be the backbone of your production.


Shots can use any cameras

A shot has to be associated to a camera to get a point-of-view. When a new shot is created, it is proposed to create a new camera. This can be a Blender default camera or a camera coming from a set of cameras that you configured for the project (see How Tos). But you can also specify a camera that already exists in the scene.

StoryLiner do not impose any requirements on the cameras used by the shots. You can then use your own cameras. They can have parents, children, constraints, be part of a rig… As long as they are camera objects, they will do.

Note: A [Storyboard_Shot] is a very specific type of shot and it will always use a Blender default camera. This has no impact on your pipeline though, since this kind of shots do not interfere with the scene and the action it contains.


All the shots of a sequence have to be in the same scene

The paradigm on which StoryLiner is based, and what makes it so powerful and efficient, is this:

  • The “sequence”, or at least the set of shots you would like to put together as an edit, has a unity of action and place. This means the cameras will all shoot the same action. This action has to happen in the scene in a “continuous way”, with no holes nor time jumps in the animation. This is very important in order to be able to shoot this action not only from everywhere in space but also at any point in time, this without having a visual glitch in the animation.

    In fact, you can approach your scene exactly as you would if you had to shoot a live action on a set with several cameras recording it from start to end, from various points of view.

  • Then you create the shots that will compose the [Edit], the result of this edit being your sequence. A shot is made of a camera, which will be created all along with the shot or picked from the scene, and a start time and end time defining the range during which the camera “records” the scene. Note that a camera can be used by several shots.

  • The set of shots you created defines the [Edit]. The edit, in StoryLiner, is similar to a playlist: shots are displayed one after the other in their order of appearance in the edit.

To play the edit in real-time in the viewport, shots then have to be part of the same scene, obviously.

This approach is really powerful for fast iterations on the way you tell your story. Just change the location of a camera, the time range of a shot or the position of this shot in the edit and you get a story with different rhythm and emotions immediately. No need to render again or with to another application to see the result.

There are some consequences though:

  • It is not possible to insert shots from other scenes or other files in an edit.

  • The sequence video, as well as the EDL and the [Edit_Board]_, can only be made of shots from the scene from where they have been rendered.

  • The VSE (Video Sequence Editor of Blender) cannot be used to directly edit the shots of a StoryLiner sequence.

In production, a project usually have more that just one sequence. The way sequences are then aggregated to create the movie (or an episode, in case of a series) is defined by the pipeline that has been set up by the studio.

StoryLiner proposes several tools that are at the pipeline level and that are available on demand with the Indie and Company Studio Edition licenses.


Limitations

Warning

  • StoryLiner is not compatible with camera binding. Indeed the Edit Play Mode overrides the standard play mode and has its own way of changing the viewport camera. Good news is this mode is far more powerful than the camera binding approach :)

    Use the conversion tools available in the Warning area of the add-on panel to convert the bound markers to shots.

  • Actions and NLA clips are not supported by the Retimer tool.

  • In some conditions the Autosave mode of Blender is not working anymore when StoryLiner is used. This is due to some operators internal conflicts on Blender side. Apparently it is a known issue and I couldn’t find a turnaround so far :/.

  • For Mac users: In the Studio Edition, the OpenTimelineIO features (importing and exporting the sequence as an edit list) are NOT AVAILABLE by default. Indeed, the installation of the OpenTimelineIO Python library often fails and it is really too much work for me to support it. I do apologize for that.

    You can try to install this library manually by following these steps. If you succeed, well, the related features will work.