Q100737: Why 1920 pixels width is optimal for Storyboard Pro and Flix compatibility

  1. Foundry
  2. Flix
  3. Flix Troubleshooting & Known Issues

SUMMARY

Flix works best with Storyboard Pro (abbreviated to SBP in this article) projects that are 1920 pixels wide. This article explains the different issues that can occur when using SBP projects with non-1920-pixel-width and why we recommend working with 1920-pixel-width projects.

 

MORE INFORMATION

Flix assumes panels imported from SBP are 1920 pixels wide. When they are not, Flix will interpret the panels as scaled. This leads to a number of issues later in the workflow so to avoid them, we strongly recommend using 1920 pixels wide projects. 

Below is a list of problems you will encounter if your SBP project is not 1920 pixels wide:

ID 609435 - SBP import of static panels with a non-1920 width resolution will always generate MOVs

  • This bug will force Flix to request SBP to create a QuickTime movie for every panel in an SBP project (regardless of whether there is a camera move or not). This will cause the SBP project to take multiple times longer to ingest into Flix, the sequence will use much more disk space, and all the panels will be animated in Flix. This can confuse Editorial, as editors would not expect an animated scene for static panels.

ID 612024 - Panels can have incorrect sizes when sent to SBP projects that have a non-1920 width value 

  • When an SBP project has a value other than 1920 as its width, conforming the project will set its width to 1920 and alter the Pixel Density defaults, which seems to cause panels not originating from SBP to have unexpected sizes. You can fix this issue by conforming once, navigating to Storyboard > Properties... > Layer Resolution, and setting the Pixel Density for Bitmap Layers value back to 100%. Then, repeat the conformation and the panels should have the correct size/scale.

ID 615968 - Panels with non-1920-width artwork version up infinitely after roundtrip via clean SBP project 

  • When a panel is created in a non-1920-width project, the panel will continue to version up during future imports to Flix. This can happen even if two artists work on the same sequence, one with a 1920-width SBP project and the other using a different-width project.

ID 616418 - Flix fails to import SBP projects with high resolution 

  • SBP fails to export high-resolution MOVs and that causes the import to Flix to fail. SBP 25 seems to handle resolutions up to 4k, but older SBP versions have problems with any resolutions over 2k. 

     

FURTHER READING 

Additional guidance on further known issues between the Flix and SBP workflow can be found in the following knowledge base articles:  

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