Anime 7 Studio Debut (PC/Mac)

Product Details

• Item Weight: 18 g
• Delivery Destinations: Visit the Delivery Destinations Help page to see where this item can be delivered.
• ASIN: B003S3RLIA
• Release Date: 22 July 2010
  

By : Smith Micro Software
Price : £8.99

Product Description

Manufacturer's Description
Anime Studio is the complete solution for easily creating cartoons, anime or cut-out animations! Make your own animations for film, video or sharing online. Get started quickly with the Beginner's Mode and included content or create complex animations using Anime Studio's powerful features. Draw your own artwork, import digital photos, add sound and video and make characters talk with built-in lip-syncing. The Content Library contains ready-to-use characters, props, video and sound and keeps all your files organized in one place. Use the Bone Tools to create a skeleton that is easily manipulated to quickly animate characters, drawings or objects. Save time over traditional frame-by-frame animation!
Box Contains

• CD
• Registration card
• Quickstart guide

 

Anime 7 Studio Debut (PC/Mac)

 

Product Features

• NEW! Beginner's Mode helps you start animating right away
• NEW! Record your own sound clips within Anime Studio with integrated Audio Recording
• NEW! Quickly organize and access your content with the new Library
• NEW! A variety of customizable brush styles make creating original artwork a snap
• NEW! Easily select and remove unwanted background colors from your photos using the Image Masking tool
• NEW! More ready-to-use content such as characters, audio and props
• NEW! The Toon Effect lets you apply a cartoon style effect to any image or video
• Built-in tutorials and sample files get you up and running quickly
• Automatic Lip Syncing
• Sequencer allows you to combine and mix animation with audio and video
• Import Quicktime or AVI video
• Pen tablet support lets you draw naturally with a pen tablet and recreate the sensation of drawing on paper
• Import audio files such as WAV, AIFF or MP3
• Choose from hundreds of ready to use characters, props, scenes and more
• Special effects like motion blur and shadows
• Export animations in SWF, AVI or MOV format
• Upload creations to YouTube and Facebook
• Render in popular formats and sizes
• Track, zoom, roll, pan, and tilt the camera

Customer Reviews

I have seen quite a few reviews of this software which have been unfair, so I have gone into some detail here. Is this software difficult to use? YES! Why? Because animation is inherently difficult! Old fashioned stop-frame animation is conceptually easier to do, but takes a long time. The way Anime Studio Debut works is to reduce the work needed to do an animation by allowing you to create a movable 2-D picture. You can then move your character like it was a puppet - so it is more like puppetry than traditional cell-based or claymation animation. This is the way all computer animation is done these days, but you have to work within the limitations of the tool. I bought this tool for my son who has an interest in animation in a career. He was able to produce a very simple moving character in a couple of hours, complete with synchronised speech. Typical steps to make an animation would be as follows: Record some dialogue within Anime Studio (Anime Studio lets you speed up the sound so it sounds more like a cartoon character e.g. Sponge Bob). Next you need to draw you character - easiest way is to import an image from the web into Anime Studio and then trace around the picture to create your own cartoon image (my son uses a Wacom pen-pad for this, but the standard mouse is OK) - bear in mind that Anime Studio Debut is a 2-D package so you want to put the character facing in the position appropriate for the scene (rotating a 2-D image is difficult and will cause you to resort back to the stop-frame approach, so usually you will need to start with your character more-or-less face-on for most scenes). Anime Studio gives you lots of tools for drawing, colouring and shading that can be used to make the drawing look more like a 3-D object. You can also morph drawings, so if you wanted to make three people with different characteristics it is an easy matter to cut-and paste your first figure and then stretch it out to make it taller or fatter or give it a bigger forehead etc. Next step is to add "bones" to the drawing. I would say that it would be more accurate to call these "joints" since the process is similar to putting joints in the limbs of a puppet. You also need to indicate which points of the drawing must not move. What you end up with is a drawn character with arms and legs that can be moved on the screen like a cardboard cut-out puppet - however, unlike a puppet Anime Studio will morph the lines around the joint in real-time to give you a smooth joint rather like having a puppet with skin (oh, and you can also get creative and put joints in where no joints would be expected)! Now Anime Studio Debut allows you to move this "puppet" in real time whilst playing back the dialogue. It will just record the movements you make so you can now easily animate the figure in time with the speech. Final step is to add lip-synching which is very difficult to do in traditional stop-frame animation. This is where the Anime Studio software manual really falls down as there doesn't seem to be any help with this feature at all - at one point I thought perhaps it couldn't actually do lip-syncing! Fortunately there are many user clips on YouTube that demonstrate how this feature can be used. Basically you simply draw several mouth shapes and then you put a little mark in the speech waveform timeline showing where you want each mouth shape to appear. So, if the dialogue requires an "ooo" sound to be made you would have a drawing of a little round mouth and show this being used on the speech timeline in the right place. Bear in mind that you will get better results if you draw the whole jaw moving rather than just the mouth, so it is better to cut and paste multiple drawings of the head with both the jaw and mouth moved appropriately (you can put a "bone" in the jaw to make this easier). Backgrounds for your animation can be drawn or traced - or simply take a photo off the net and use it as a background (you can use the tools in Microsoft Paint to make it look like a drawing). Job done! Note that you can edit the animation you do frame-by-frame as well, so you can also add stop-frame style animated sequences if you need to, or tidy up your animation at will.
Conclusion: Anime Studio Debut is actually a great tool for doing professional looking 2-D animations better than "Sponge Bob" quality and beyond the quality of "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" if you put the effort in. It is not Disney Pixar or "Futurama" quality (you need a 3-D tool for that, although you could update to the Professional version of Anime Studio which is 3-D but it is very much more expensive - might be a good step-up though if you really get into using Anime Studio Debut so its good to know its there). Its not going to be the right tool for doing computer video game graphics or movie style special effects (you can import photos for backgrounds or for tracing around but you cannot really animate them - you can only animate computer drawings created in Anime Studio Debut - I think a lot of the reviews here criticising Anime Studio Debut have assumed you can animate photos but I don't think you can really but if you work within the limitations of the tool by animating only drawings made in Anime Studio it does give great results). It is difficult and still quite time consuming to do an animation in Anime Studio and there are a lot of things to learn - the manual isn't very good but fortunately a lot of users have put good training video clips on You-Tube. You will need patience! However, you don't need as much patience as you need for stop-frame animation. A 5 minute stop-frame animation will require 7500 individual images to be created - it's a method that's easy enough to understand but short animations will take weeks to complete. A similar 5 minute animation in Anime Studio debut will probably take a few hours to put together, and look more professional too. I would estimate it is about ten times faster to do a professional animation in Anime Studio Debut when compared to stop-frame. Furthermore, most of the work in Anime Studio is in creating the characters - if you re-use the characters or simply morph the shapes to create new characters you will find your second animation even quicker than your first. You will still need skill and imagination in creating your animation. I bought this tool for my teenage son who had an interest in pursuing animation as a career - but it looks like he doesn't have the patience to put in the hours to create an animation of a scene that only takes a minute to play through in his head! I think it has served its purpose in that he is now considering that animation may not be for him! Maybe he made the mistake of believing that because he enjoys The Simpsons and Futurama that he would also enjoy making his own cartoons...but it was rather more effort than he had bargained for. Personally I love the tool and think it was a very low price for what it can do, but us grown-ups tend to have bags of patience. If you work within the limitations of the tool and have some patience you will get great results. Here's a tip: showing a character rotating its head is really tough and will probably tax your drawing skills to the limit and force you to resort to stop-frame style animation - it's much easier to cut to another character talking and then cut back to the key character having completed the head rotation than to actually show the smooth transition from face-on to profile views. I think this gives you an idea of how you must work with the tool and within its limitations rather than creating a scene in your head and trying to create a faithful copy of that scene on the computer exactly as you imagined it - if you try to do that you will be making a mountain for yourself to climb.

I hesitated a little before buying Anime Studio Debut 7 - largely as I'd heard stories that it was unintuitive, difficult to use etc. Having used it now since Christmas, I'd have to acknowledge there are a few oddities like having to click on the edge of a basic or freehand shape to fill it in with colour etc. The interface too is rather old-fashioned looking - a bit like one of those early art packages. That said, if you're willing to play around with it, and spend a little time checking out the tutorials on YouTube, it is undoubtedly good and a pretty powerful animation tool. I'd done zero animation before I bought it but now I am easily using switch layers to make cartoon characters blink and change expression, working with bone rigging to make characters move, altering camera angles/zoom to create flypasts around objects, doing movie style lettering that fades/dissolves, making cycles to do rain/snow and all kinds of different things. I'd say it's worth buying.
Anyway, hope this review helps you decide and go luck with your animating, it's lots of fun and massively addictive.

 

Anime 7 Studio Debut (PC/Mac)