How can I combine whiteboard animation, stop motion and live video without massive import/export and adjustments?

Question

I have watched videos from AsapSCIENCE. These videos combine stop motion, whiteboard board animation (drawing effects) and real life scenes.

I found a whiteboard animation software, VideoScribe, that lets me achieve drawing like effects without any drawing knowledge, however it does not let me add any video or edit the video track.

Suppose I

draw a man -> drag him -> walking animation -> draw a girl -> drag and animate again -> draw a dog jumping towards them -> erase dog -> drag both to come close -> draw rain -> raining -> draw umbrella -> ...

I'll prefer to use videoscribe for drawing effect and flash for rest. But I need to adjust frames everytime. And if I later on realize that dog should look more cute. I would have to rework since It may again require adjusting scenes, platform and position of other elements.

I was wondering if Flash has some actionscript which can put sketch/drawing/painting effect to a SVG image then we at least combine video scribing with Flash only. It'll save a lot of time in importing/exporting and editing. Especially when we commit a mistake in past work.

Is there any software or Action Script to achieve this without needing advanced knowledge?

Any end-to-end tutorial which can teach me how to make videos like this may also help me.

Answer 1

After Effects is probably the easiest all inclusive solution that could handle everything they do in those videos, but they are doing multiple things and there isn't really a good way to give a tutorial for all of them.

You would need to shoot the video on a green screen so that it can be extracted and layered in. You can then animate the layer than those green screened clips and animate them with keyframe animation to make them move as needed on top of the white board.

The whiteboard itself can also be made using Write On effects or path animation.

Similar things can also be done with other decent NLEs like Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Vegas, Media Composer or Lightworks, but path animation and motion graphics (which this is a class of) are most easily done in After Effects.

After Effects is to video what Flash is to Internet games and basic scripted animation. It is primarily done without programing and through more traditional vector animation workflows. It is probably the closest to what you are looking for if you like the behavior of flash but want it to support more video stuff and require less scripting.

Answer 2

Well in that case you would export the video from VideoScribe and then edit it together with your other video material in an video editing program (also referred to as NLE). Quite straight forward process, how you do this step by step depends on the video editing software you want to use.

There is the free Lightworks and commercial solutions like Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas or Apple Final Cut and Apple iMovie. I'd suggest you look into a solution that looks like it appeals to you and then watch a tutorial on the basics of that program.