How to Make Sure Your Animation is Fast to Edit

When you are animating in Brush Ninja you want to make sure that your animation is fast to edit. This means that you can quickly make changes to your animation without having to wait for the software to catch up.

Here are some tips to make sure your animation is fast to edit:

Minimise Grouping

Grouping shapes is great for moving multiple shapes at once. However, if you have a lot of groups in your animation it can slow down the software. This is because the software has to calculate the position of each shape in the group.

If you know you’re not going to need to ungroup the shapes, then you can merge them. This will make the shapes into a single image, which is much faster to edit.

Simplify drawings

Brush Ninja is a vector editing tool, which means that it uses mathematical equations to draw shapes. The more complex the shape, the more calculations the software has to do to draw it. The built in stickers are optimised for speed, so if you can use them, then do.

If you want to use the brush tool then try to use the brush tool and make use of fill colours to simplify the shapes. This will make the shapes faster to edit.

The marker brush is really cool to look at but does generate a lot of shapes which can be slow. By all means use it, but it might be worth merging the drawing afterwards to speed up editing.

Frame Duration

The frame duration is how long a frame is displayed for. If you want a frame to appear for longer then try changing the duration value above the frame. A common way to do this is to duplicate a frame, but this will generate more content for the app to process. If you use the frame duration setting you can keep the number of frames down for the same effect.

Background Images

If you have static content in your animation that doesn’t change, then consider using a background image. The background image doesn’t have to be a photo. You could just as easily draw the background in Brush Ninja, save the single frame, and then import that as the background image in the editor. This will make the animation faster to edit as the software doesn’t have to calculate any of the static content.

Reduce the number of objects

Try to keep the number of items per frame as low as possible. This might mean merging shapes, or simplifying drawings. Simplicity is key.

More Help?

How to Use Brush Ninja

Brush Ninja Interface
How to Make a Gif - An animation primer.
Sound Effects - Add audio effects to your animations.
Using Your Own Images - Use your own images to create animations.
Select Mode - Move, Scale, Rotate, Skew, Group, Duplicate, Copy and Paste.
Stickers
Colours - Fill and Line colours, and how to pick custom colours.
Keyboard Shortcuts