Amazon.com: Anime Studio Debut 6 [OLD VERSION]: Mac OS X: Software

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3.9 out of 5 stars (108 customer reviews)

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157 of 159 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Easy to get started, difficult to master - all that a beginner/amateur needs to create very sophisticated 2-d animation!, October 7, 2009

Nathan Andersen "film lover, philosophy profe... (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anime Studio Debut 6 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

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.

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44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun animation software, easy to get started, but not for true beginners, September 20, 2009

Natalie Mootz (Huntington Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anime Studio Debut 6 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

Length:: 0:46 Mins

Bottom Line
If you already know a bit about animation techniques, Anime Studio Debut 6 lets you easily jump into making your own animated movies. On the other hand, if you don't understand terms like "key frames" and "walk cycles," you'll have a difficult time using it without some more study. When I was a beginning game design student, I used Maya and Photoshop to create animations. However, I think Anime Studio Debut 6 is much more fun and easy to use for animation than either of those programs and it also allows you to get up and running with your cartoons much more quickly. It's an extremely good value for the money if you want to start animating.

Strengths
* Easy to get started: The tutorials are one of the software's strengths. They are enjoyable, easy to follow, and very comprehensive in the use of the Anime Studio tools. However, the tutorials do not attempt to teach you much about important animation concepts. (You'll need to learn about rigging, timelines, walk cycles, etc., somewhere else. I recommend The Animator's Survival Kit or similar.). I animated a simple pre-made figure in about an hour using the Quick Start tutorial.
* The Bones System: It's a bit harder to create your first animation sequence from scratch than it was to use the Quick Start files, but it's MUCH easier than it was with Maya, thanks to the "Bones" system which makes rigging extremely easy and intuitive. (See my video demo.)
* Animate your own photos: Another cool feature of the software is the ability to animate photos or mix them into vector animations.
* Automatic lip-sync: Anime Studio Debut 6 has an automatic lip-sync feature that will instantly make your character's mouth move along with an audio file.
* You can create dramatic camera moves easily.

Other Notes
* It definitely helps to understand Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator concepts (layers, vectors, curves, channels, etc.). Although, I have to say, Anime Studio's method of making curves is MUCH more intuitive and easy to use than Photoshop or Illustrator.
* Be aware that the tutorials come in the form of PDF files rather than being software-based and are not included as a pre-printed manual in the box -- this means you'll have to alt-Tab between the PDF and the Anime Studio program to use them. Although the PDF tutorials are great, the online tutorials pretty much stink for this software since they are primarily geared towards the Pro version of the software, not the Debut version.
* Sometimes in the large User's Guide (231 pages) it's hard to tell which features are only for the Anime Studio Pro version instead of this version. For example, it covers using "Scripts," but there is no feature for scripts in the Anime Studio Debut 6 (non-pro) version.
* The software description makes it look like anyone can animate with this software, but you do need to have drawing skills or access to licensed artwork. If you can't draw a flower, it won't draw one for you. It also doesn't do cel shading for you or come with any textures or backgrounds. (You'll need the Manga Studio Debut 4 (Win/Mac) software for that.) You can create drawings with a mouse, tablet, or by scanning them in and tracing them.
* This software is a bit oddly named. You can make any type of 2-D animation you want, not just anime.

System Specifications
I did not test this on a Mac, but the software ran very smoothly on these two Windows computers with no slowdowns or freeze-ups:
- Vista Home Premium SP1 on an HP Pavilion dv2700 Notebook with an AMD Turion 2GHz processor and 3GB RAM
- XP Media Center Edition SP3 on a Dell XPS 410 Desktop with an Intel Pentium 2.8GHz processor and 4GB RAM

Don't forget to watch my 47-second video demo of how the Bones system works.

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42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An arduous learning curve, it's suitable only for the highly motivated, November 12, 2009

William W. Davis "famousdavis" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Anime Studio Debut 6 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

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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.

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