Anime Studio Debut 6
The fun, quick and affordable way to create animations, Anime Studio is the ideal solution for first time animators, hobbyists and digital enthusiasts. Create your own cartoons and animations–the ideal solution for first …
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Tags: Anime, Debut, Studio
January 28th, 2010 by admin | Posted in Software | Comments (2)
January 28th, 2010 at 2:08 am
Length:: 1:29 Mins
I've been playing with Anime Studio Debut in my free time for about a week now (on a Mac, though this package includes installation discs for both mac and windows), and I'm a complete beginner. I'm pretty happy with what I've been able to do after just one week. Anime Studio Debut is a lot of fun, and is a very sophisticated and flexible program. It's very easy to get started animating simple things, but for more complicated designs it can be fairly time intensive. This video, for example, that I created in order to practice my animation skills, took several hours to create. (I posted this in October, which is why I made it Halloween-themed. I'm not always inclined to the macabre!)
The program is focused around creating characters whose design is flexible enough that they can be molded and shaped in a number of scenarios. That means that, even though it took me a long time to create this short video, more than half of that time went into creating the skeleton and now that I've created him I can pose him any way I like. To create a character you first draw the outlines of the various components of its shape (legs, head, chest, etc.) and fill them in as you like. Then, you can put "bones" into these elements to form an invisible "skeleton" (not like the visible skeleton you see in my video - that guy has invisible bones within his visible bones!). Then, to move it about you just select a bone manipulator tool with your cursor and then you can rotate the bones around whatever joint you've established for them and whatever parts of the body are "bound" to that bone move with it.
Once you have characters, backgrounds and objects drawn (each one established as a different "layer" of your final image), you can animate a scene. How it works is that you create all your characters and all the elements of a scene in different layers, and then, on the time line, you can have them interact. How you do that is very simple: there is a timeline that is comprised of 24 unique frames per second of animation, and you can set each character or object however you like on frame one and then, maybe, at frame 12 and the computer then creates a smooth path for that object between frames 1 and 12, and it will traverse that path in the first half second of the animation. Whatever frames result from your direct manipulation become "keyframes" and the computer interpolates results between them. For the skeleton's mouth I had to set "keyframes" nearly every other frame (i.e. every 1/12 of a second - I know there's a way to do this more easily, but I couldn't figure out how to use the free lip sync software that they recommend in the instructions). For most other things I found I only had to place elements every half second or so (for the moon and the clouds it was every half minute or so).
I like that you can animate each layer separately - here I set up the clouds and the moon and the pumpkin first, and then I molded the movements of the skeleton around those. I animated the mouth very last - and even though it's not very precise that took a lot of time to do - once all of the other movements were in place.
I really like this program - it's a lot of fun even though it can be very time consuming. One thing I found while working on this project is that it really needs to have some time saver features built in. For example, I found that while animating I was constantly switching between tools: I'd click on one tool and then make a minor modification then another tool and the back and forth was a real pain. I expect there are ways to assign tools to keys on the keyboard but I wish there was some way I could jump between "recently used" tools with a mouse click, so I don't have to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard and back again or move the mouse back and forth between the drawing and the toolbar so often. There were other minor frustrations I had, where things weren't quite as intuitive as I'd have liked. Some of that is just a matter of getting to know the program, but it is worth knowing that while this is very easy to start out with, once you try and do anything semi-complicated, there is a learning curve. Still, it's a very flexible program - and, while the animation I created to illustrate it is pretty amateurish, I've seen enough to know that with time and effort this has the power to create very cool and exciting 2-d animations (and can even simulate some 3-d type effects).
While this is ideal for the aspiring cartoonist, this would be great for any creative and intelligent kids - and I know my older kids (11 and 13) were fascinated by it and will get a lot of use from it. Rather than let them watch cartoons, tell them to make cartoons. It'll take time but that time will be used creatively and productively and will be rewarding, and they will be forced to learn about attention to detail (because the computer doesn't know anything you don't tell it). Highly recommended for geeks like me and kids of all ages.
January 28th, 2010 at 4:54 am
QUICK SUMMARY: A richly-featured, low-cost program is a great introduction into animation, but the program doesn’t do much to help new users learn the craft of 2-D animation.
I selected Anime Studio Debut mostly for my kids’ sake (teen and pre-teen). Since earlier this year, they’ve all enjoyed using a digital camera and Windows Movie Maker to create movies, especially Lego-based movies using Lego-built characters, vehicles and movie sets. Anime Studio seemed like something they’d enjoy using. Okay, and I’ll admit I was intrigued, too.
In reality, I think the program offers a lot of value for the money, but the implementation for a “Debut” program — one where no prior knowledge of animation is required or expected — left a lot to be desired. Although the makers offer a very thorough tutorial to help new users explore the program, I found it to be tiresome switching back-and-forth between the PDF-based, 41-page tutorial document and the actual program. I prefer the more elegant way of learning a new program where the program itself uses wizards to hand-hold me through the learning process. For instance, when I learned Sony Vegas Movie Studio earlier this year, its wizards got me using a program that is certainly no less complicated than Anime Studio, and perhaps is more so. Whereas I continue to enjoy learning how to use Vegas, my enthusiasm for Anime Studio waned quickly.
My older, pre-teen daughter and I were both frustrated at the lack of context-sensitive help or menus in Anime Studio. I like programs that let me right-click anywhere I happen to be, and a context-sensitive menu pops up with appropriate suggestions for what I’m doing at that moment.
I will credit Anime Studio Debut as being a “fun” program. My pre-teen daughter especially has enjoyed manipulating the template characters that come with this program, giving herself and her siblings a lot to laugh at. My daughter hasn’t tried using the Users’ Guide to learn the program — her learning so far has been by trial-and-error. If the authors of this program could see my daughter interacting with their program, they could see why a PDF Users’ Guide tutorial isn’t what’s needed for this “Debut” program.
I am concerned that Anime Studio crashed a LOT while we’ve used the program on an otherwise stable Vista laptop computer. If you install this program, I suggest monitoring the Reliability Monitor (in Vista and Windows 7) to see how reliable your computer currently is, and again how reliable it is after you’ve installed and begun using Anime Studio Debut. (To find the Reliability Monitor, click the Start button, then type “Reliability” in the Start Search textbox to find the monitor).
SUMMARY: I think Anime Studio Debut offers a lot of value for the money. I’ve spent nearly as much money on stupid kids’ games that weren’t nearly so interesting to play with. The functionality of this program is pretty deep. Where the program comes up short is not on the functionality it has, but in how new users must go about learning how to use those functions. For a “Debut” program, there is a lot that can be done to make learning Anime Studio Debut easier to do.