Anime Studio Debut 7 [OLD VERSION]

by Smith Micro Software Inc.

Product Features

• Anime Studio Debut 7 offers complete animation for digital artists--perfect for first-time animators, hobbyists, and digital enthusiasts
• Create your own art using intuitive vector-based draw, paint, and fill tools;
• Or easily import artwork from popular graphics programs and use pre-built content to get started fast
• Record your own sound clips inside Anime Studio with integrated Audio Recording and make your characters talk with built-in Lip Syncing
• Export to the most popular web and video formats, or upload and share on YouTube or Facebook directly from within Anime Studio
• Point-and-click to attach bones to your characters for easy manipulation and reduce production time over traditional frame-by-frame animation

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B003NS5KQ0
• Item model number: ASO70HBX2
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 6, 2010
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (111 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #817 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #9 in Software > Graphics > Animation

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The fun, quick, and affordable way to create animations, Anime Studio is the ideal solution for first-time animators, hobbyists, and digital artists. The new Beginner's Mode helps you start animating immediately.

The Beginner's Mode helps you start animating right away. Easily toggle between the Beginner's Mode and the regular Tool Palette.

Record your own sound clips with integrated Audio Recording and make your characters talk with built-in Lip Syncing.

Easily Create Animations in Minutes

Create Your Own Art or Import Content to Get Started Fast
Make your own characters and objects with intuitive vector-based draw, paint, and fill tools. You can also easily import artwork from popular graphics programs and use pre-built content.

Use the Bone Tools to Quickly Animate Your Characters
Point-and-click to attach bones to your characters for easy manipulation and reduce production time over traditional frame-by-frame animation. Anime Studio's unique bone rigging toolset allows you to create a skeleton that can be easily manipulated to animate characters, simple drawings, or objects in your animation.

Easily Organize Projects with the Timeline, Keyframes, and Layers
Anime Studio moves your character naturally along the timeline with keyframes, creating smooth animations. Use multiple layers to edit your animation, and add sound, special effects, and more. Quickly make your characters talk with built-in Lip Syncing.

Share Everywhere
Export to the most popular Web and video formats, or upload and share on YouTube or Facebook directly from within Anime Studio.

Anime Studio Debut Gets You Started Right Away!

Free Characters
Anime Studio includes Jace, Thorn, Liz, Anime Boy, and many other exclusive, royalty-free, vector-based characters you can use for your own animations.

Free Tutorials
Tutorials and sample files show you how to maximize Anime Studio's powerful features and get you animating right away.

Quickly animate your characters with Anime Studio's unique bone rigging system.

Organize and access your content with the new Library. Anime Studio is packed with ready-to-use content.

Bring Photos to Life
Give life to your favorite photos. Import digital camera images, attach bones, and easily turn your photographs into animated movies.

Import Your Art
Import your own illustrations or create unique characters for your cartoons. Animate anything within the reach of your imagination.

Features

• New! Beginner's Mode
  Start animating right away. The Beginner's Mode displays the key tools used in Anime Studio, and includes feature rollover descriptions and video tutorials to quickly get you familiar with the program. You can easily toggle between the Beginner's Mode and the regular Tool Palette.
• New! Integrated Audio Recording
  Record your own sound clips right within Anime Studio, and adjust the pitch from high to low to fit your animated characters. Recordings get saved and then automatically added to your timeline for quick lip-synching.
• New! Content Library
  Keeping all of your Anime Studio content organized has never been easier. Quickly browse through existing content or save your own content to the library. Add content to your scenes with a simple drag and drop or search for items by keyword. You can even browse for additional Anime Studio content available on Content Paradise right inside the library. 


  A variety of customizable brush styles make creating original artwork a snap.

  Import and animate your own video and artwork.

• New! Toon Image & Video Filter
  Apply a cartoon-style effect to any image or video with a couple of mouse clicks. Fine-tune and customize the toon filter settings by adjusting the saturation, lightness, edge level, and more.
• New! Brush Styles
  Choose from a variety of customizable brush styles and pattern brushes when creating your own artwork in Anime Studio. Adjust the angle and spacing of the brush style, and see a real-time preview of your customized brush before starting your drawing.
• New! Image Masking
  You no longer need other graphics applications to cut yourself out of a photograph to create cut-out animations. Easily select and remove unwanted background colors from your images using the Image Masking tool.
• New! Follow Path Tool
  You can select any character or object to follow and bend along a pre-drawn path, making animating along curves easy. In addition to bending along the path, you can also choose to have the object automatically orient itself to follow the path it's been assigned to.
• New! More Ready-To-Use Content
  Anime Studio Debut provides an extensive content library with hundreds of pieces of ready-to-use content including fully rigged, vector-based characters like Jace, Thorn, Anime Boy, and Liz, as well as props, scenes, action words, stock video and images, sound effects, and more so you can start creating your own animations right away.
• New! Gather Media
  You no longer have to worry about broken images or missing files in your Anime Studio project file when moving any of the included assets (audio, video, images) to a different machine or location on your hard drive. The Gather Media function collects all files (audio, video, images) that are part of your animation project, and then creates folders for the collected media.

  Easily apply a cartoon-style effect to any image or video.

• New! StuffIt Connect
  Easily share your Anime Studio projects with friends. The integrated StuffIt Connect feature allows you to create an archive of your project within Anime Studio and then seamlessly upload it to the Web. You can then create email invites for friends that you want to share your content with. This serves as a great alternative to an ftp client, since your friends can access the download link from any browser. A free one-year subscription to the StuffIt Connect service is included with your Anime Studio purchase, offering 2 GB of storage and 4 GB of bandwidth per month.
  • Built-in tutorials and sample files get you up and running quickly
  • Easily make your characters talk with built-in Lip Syncing
  • Combine and mix animation with audio and video using the Sequencer
  • Quickly animate your characters using the Bone Tools
  • Motion Tracking lets you attach animated objects to target points in your video and have them automatically track throughout the clop
  • 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
  • Special effects like motion blur and shadows
  • Export animations in SWF, AVI, or MOV format
  • Upload creations to YouTube and Facebook directly from within Anime Studio
  • Render in popular formats and sizes

Product Description

Animation & Cartoons

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

129 of 138 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Real winner!, September 16, 2010

By 

D. Vance "NinjaKnittingGramma" (Central USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anime Studio Debut 7 [OLD VERSION] (Software)

(What's this?)

So, I read some of the other reviews. And, obviously they are from people who really know and understand computer animation.

Not me! I know absolutely ZIPPO about computer animation. What I DO know is that this program is a blast! It's very simple to use, intuitive, and makes ME feel like I understand how to create animation!

I would go much more into detail, however my 12 yr old granddaughter saw this and took it home with her! She sat down with her laptop in my living room, and within 10 minutes was creating much better animation that I had done. She absolutely LOVES it! This would make an awesome gift for a teen.

It's not a professional program, nor is it meant to be. But as an introduction to the joys of computer animation, it completely succeeds.

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flash lite, September 24, 2010

By 

Dinubabear (Landover, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Anime Studio Debut 7 [OLD VERSION] (Software)

(What's this?)

The tutorial on this is very good, and it will have you making flash-like 2D cartoons in a few hours. It is more limited than Adobe Flash, but is easier to learn in my opinion, because of this. And it is very affordable instead of spending hundreds of dollars for real Flash. The "bones & joints" to articulate the carton figures are very nice and make animating a lot easier.

Realize that nothing will provide you with patience and artistic talent, and both are required for making cartoons in any medium. But if you want to see if you can make popular internet cartoons, I would buy this to find out, instead of investing a lot, only to find that you think it is too much work.

130 of 153 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Spiderman Project: Anime Studio Debut 7: A Critical Review, September 23, 2010

By 

Andre Lawrence (Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anime Studio Debut 7 [OLD VERSION] (Software)

(What's this?)

Length:: 3:41 Mins

* Pre-review comments

** Installation, Inspection and Tech Support (or, lack thereof)

*** Spiderman

**** Conclusion

* Almost a year ago, I received and reviewed Anime Studio Debut 6. At the time, I mentioned that it was an entry-level animation software that was a good buy despite its limitations and high learning curve.

I mentioned that ASD was, in my opinion, a strip-down version of Adobe's Flash and Illustrator software but at "95% off." What they needed to do, I suggested, was to simplify the interface and provide proper tutorials on how the software works because the 3 two-minute tutorials were woefully insufficient. They did somewhat better this time offering two instruction manuals in pdf and a series of vignette tutorials on what the tools do. Herein lies the problem. Unless you're into silly nonsense like dancing stars and bouncing balls, you don't have any clue as to what the program can do. So, this year I decided to take a very big leap to see just how well the software works in connection with what they ("Smith Micro") say their product can do. I gave myself a small project: to make a 3 minute cartoon. The software totes itself as being able to make traditional 2D cartoons as well as "jig jag" -- a mixture of photographs and illustrations. The software DOESN'T work as it should. This cartoon is basically what I had in mind if I could just use Anime Studio alone. Since it's incapable of utilizing jpg's, and only has one (1) audio channel, I was forced to use four other softwares to get close to what I thought ASD-7 should do by itself.

** I installed the software and didn't do any work on it for a week while I poured over the User Manual and the Quick Start Guide and video tutorials. I took extensive notes on my newsprint pad as I sketched out how the story would look. I collected jpg's, sound files, recorded actor's voice-overs (at my expense) in the meantime. I also started sketching out the characters.

One of the things I initially found exciting was that the software can allow you to import various image, sound and movie files and afterwards export them in a number of different formats including a .mov file and an .flv file. The software DOESN'T handle all of these formats flawlessly nor was there any explanation offered as to why it doesn't.

One of the problems I got stuck on was the transition from one image to another. "Peter Parker" is recovering from a devastating fight with "The Green Goblin." He's at the point in his life where he knows he has to decide is he going to continue being a superhero or is he going to settle down and have a normal life with his on-again/ off-again girlfriend, Mary-Jane ("MJ") Watson? For that initial deliberation, I imagined him in his bedroom recovering, but I wanted to see and hear him thinking about his choices. A simple transition from sitting on the bed to walking to the window was all that's called for. For almost two weeks (I still have the movie files for my records, btw) I was unable, through the user manual and unfortunately by tech support to understand WHY doesn't a jpg image make a simple transition ("dissolve") into the other. That is a standard in slideshow formatting. The software is supposed to offer two (2) different ways in which to accomplish this. One, (after importing all images at Frame 0), setting keyframes at the respective places and, after opening the layer menu, adjusting the Visibility setting. This should, according to the User Manual, show a change in transition at the desired point. Another way is to use the Opacity setting. If you set the opacity at 100% and at a later keyframe, set Opacity at 0 (keeping the Visibility column checked), you'd see a gradual invisibility happen while the visibility of the image on the second later begins to appear concurrently. But this never happened.

Repeated calls to Tech Support resulted in a waste of cellphone minutes. Let me make a recommendation that will be of some support. Chris Georgenes produces a series of books about animation that is cross-software How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation . It is phenomenal. Originally produced as an accompaniment for Adobe Flash, it shows you the basics through very complex exercises that can be done with competent software, so even entry-level softwares wouldn't be a problem. DON'T buy into Smith Micro's ploy to get you to buy lessons or a book that they're producing for the software. They haven't fulfilled their basic obligation as it is.

BTW, reading other reviewers' experiences with ASD and tech support, my situation is not unique.

*** SPIDERMAN

After I had drafted out the storyline and created a storyboard for the project, I was disappointed that ASD7 was unable to do a simple, seamless transition between layers. This, after changing the jpg images to the identical png made no difference. So, I used the following software to get the effects of the animation.

Anime Studio Debut 7 (for lip synching, although the mouth in one scene had a life of its own!)

Adobe Photoshop CS3. (for image creation.)

iPhoto 09/ iTunes (For sequencing. After I created the slideshow, I brought it into ASD and added voice and lip-synching. iTunes enabled me to take a voice file and save it as an mp3, which then went into ASD.)

Audacity (for audio mixing. ASD and AS Pro only allow you 1 channel for audio. I thought about a particular scene, for instance, in Mary Jane's living room. I thought about her in the shower getting ready for the date while having music play in the living room and the phone starts to ring. So, I mixed the sound of the shower along with the music and telephone and Audacity mixed it into a single audio file that I just uploaded into ASD.) By the way, Audacity is free!

iMovie 09. After I created all of the episodes from ASD and iPhoto, I was able to assemble it all here and add the closing credits.

21 days +300 file folder items +1 GB of storage + 1 week of frustrating conversations with Smith Micro = a lot of fun, nonetheless.

**** Pro's and Con's

Pro's

+ Software is relatively inexpensive. (But if you're able to hold off and buy during the end of the year holiday season, the price of the software drops to less than half of retail.)

+ Much, more instruction provided when compared to ASD 6.

+ Installation was less than 3 minutes

+ Simple vector (not bitmap/jpg) based animation when used with Bones and Voice tool really does work fine.

+ Best suited for teenagers.

+ Separate Mac and Windows installation cd's.

Con's

- Software's layer capacity DOESN'T work well with non vector-based/ png images.

- Interface is still too crowded and is in desperate need of a make-over. The pale grey theme and tool icons look a bit too childish for a paid product.

- Tech support is, as other reviewers correctly stated, disinclined to directly answer questions without bringing up that there's a teaching fee for "that" information.

- On the Spiderman project, the audio effects the position of the mouth and occasionally, despite no keyframing, the mouth moves as high the nose when a character is talking.

- Only 1 audio track. (There should be at least 5.)

Considering everything the product is worth 2.5 stars.