Anime Studio
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| Anime Studio | |
| Developer: | e frontier |
|---|---|
| OS: | Windows 98 / Windows Me / Windows XP / Windows 2000, Mac OS X |
| Use: | 2D Animation |
| Website: | Anime Studio homepage |
Anime Studio is a vector based 2D animation software for animators distributed by e frontier. Anime Studio is compatible both for Windows and Macintosh operating systems. A Linux version is announced. The software comes in two flavours, named Anime Studio and Anime Studio Pro, the first being restricted in terms of possible length and image size as well as not having all the functions of the Pro version.
The software was originally developed under the name "Moho" by LostMarble, the last Moho version 5.4 is identical with the current release of Anime Studio Pro. LostMarble is still the home of Papagayo, a free lip sync software which works with Anime studio.
Despite its name, Anime Studio isn't restricted to animation in anime style. It can serve as a time-saving frontend to create flash cartoons, it can create cutout-style animation quite easily, and it can, within its restrictions, even mimick some pencil drawn animation. Since it features some basic 3D funcionality, it can be seen as a 2½D program. Short films, especially those which tell their story in one scene, are fast and easy to create. For bigger projects some additional software is required, like video and sound editors.
[edit] Features
- Anime Studio features layers of different types for artwork as well as for grouping and switching assets. Layers can be animated in perspective.
- Camera movements can be animated easily.
- Pressure-sensitive tablets in combination with brush shapes create strokes which look quite good and more similar to natural media than pure vector graphis. Artwork created in Anime Studio is basically resolution-independent.
- The animator can create a skeleton of Bones to which he attaches pieces of artwork. The skeleton works with inverse kinematics and makes it much easier to animate a character.
- Tweening of all layer, vector shapes, and bone animation.
- Styles for outlines and fills can be defined and applied easily.
- Masks are possible, if just a bit difficult to do.
- Anime Studio supports several file formats to import pictures and video. Alpha channels of PNG and video files are recognised.
- A soundtrack can be add (only one at a time). In combination with Papagayo Anime Studio provides automatic lip sync.
- Anime Studio exports films to .swf, but without certain effects which are not part of the .swf file format. Export to video includes everything and can be done in any resolution. Videos can be rendered with an alpha channel.
- Most tools are completely scriptable (in Lua (programming language)).
[edit] Restrictions
- Anime Studio is not able to combine several files into one, and it doesn't have several scenes within one file. For longer projects additional software is needed (a video editor for video output, or Flash for .swf output).
- Only one soundtrack can be loaded into a scene, this starts at the first frame and cannot be shifted in time.
- Layer order cannot be animated.
- The timeline merges keyframes of all elements and leaves out some animated features like line width and colour changes.
- The tools and user interface are somewhat peculiar and need some training to get used to it.
