Anime Studio Debut 5 [OLD VERSION]

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Product Features

• Create your characters and objects by drawing or scanning directly into Anime Studio 5
• With bone-rigging, vector-based graphics, and layer-based workflow you can create animated shorts up to two minutes in length
• Add a soundtrack or other special effects, such as lip-synching, line effects, camera angle, glows, particle effects and more, to your animation
• Output your finished animations to popular movie formats, including AVI, MOV, and Flash
• Anime Studio 5 is compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000IK412K
• Item model number: ASO-C50-DEM-R
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 27, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,409 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

Amazon.com

efrontier's Anime Studio 5 is a complete 2D animation program for creating movies, cartoons, anime, or cut animations. Create your own desktop animated shorts in the style of South Park and JibJab, or use Anime Studio to produce full-length animation (up to two minutes) for film, video, or streaming over the web.

It's easy to quickly create simple camera movements and characters.

Easily create characters and objects.	Use layering behaviors that are similar to other design programs.
A wealth of tools at your fingertips.	Using keyframes and a timeline, test your animations as you design.
Bone-rigging uses spring-like simulation to calculate dynamic character movement.	Vector-based tools make quick designs easy.
Give your characters a voice with Papagayo lip-synching software.	Create sophisticated special effects.

Anime Studio 5 allows digital enthusiasts at home to bring their imaginations to life. The program is fun to use, quick to learn, and easy on your pocketbook. It is an ideal solution for first time animators, hobbyists and digital enthusiasts. Draw original art, import your digital pictures, dub and add subtitles to existing videos, or choose from many built-in characters to grease your animation wheels and get a feel for the software's capabilities.

This program includes everything aspiring artists need to create top quality animations from start to finish -- it simplifies the animation process and empowers artists to create their projects faster and easier than ever before. You'll be surprised by how quickly you can get started. Packed with ready-to-use anime style characters you can create your own animations right out of the box. Tutorials and sample files show you how to maximize Anime Studio's powerful features giving you the jump start you'll need to begin your first project.

Once you feel at home with the mechanics of the software, you'll be ready to move on to your own art. Sketch your original characters and backdrops, scan in and import graphics, or if you use a pen tablet you can recreate the sensation of drawing on paper. Built with vector graphics, Anime Studio 5 provides power and flexibility with multiple layering and the capacity to resize images without sacrificing quality. Another powerful element of Anime Studio 5 is the use of "bones." Using the software's bone rigging system you can add a skeleton to any image to bring it to life. With Anime Studio 5 there is no need to create new art for each individual frame as you animate -- just adjust the bones to your desired position and the program will generate the movement for you.

You can also count on Anime Studio 5 to help direct your animated action with an intuitive timeline. Setting your movements to a timeline makes scene changes feel seamless and natural, so the plot of your animated short is easier to follow. No animation is complete without an audio soundtrack. Anime Studio 5 helps you add emotion and style to your animations by adding sound in WAV and AIFF formats. And once you've completed a project, you can publish your results for a variety of media, including video, TV, and web formats.

Design and Layout
Anime Studio 5 gives you total control over your canvas and makes it easy for you to organize and complete your project using layers. With this intuitive software under your belt you can set up your 2D canvas to the exact dimensions you want. Using Anime Studio's vector-based graphics you can freely adjust canvas resolution and size without losing image quality.

If you're already accustomed to other graphics and design programs, such as Photoshop or Quark, you'll be pleased with Anime Studio's familiar layer-based workflow. It is an easy and efficient way to organize your assets and create your animation, and you'll save time by reusing your art. Simply create an asset once and place it on a layer, then refer to that layer any time you need to reuse a piece of art. Advanced layer features include Switch Layers which allows you to rotate among all the layers in a set and shows only one layer a time. This saves you a great deal of time when animating body movements or facial expressions. You can also use Anime Studio to rig your characters, objects and scenes with the revolutionary bone system that makes the animation process easier than ever before. Bones create a skeleton that determines joints or flex points in your artwork. You can then manipulate the bones to move the image into new positions without time-consuming redraws.

Simple tools let you design dynamic character movement.

Stop thinking of your drawings as fixed, static images -- with Anime Studio your drawings become like soft rubber with stiff wires inside that help you move and position the objects on the screen. Bones are never displayed in the final render, they're just used as a tool during the animation process. And to make the process smoother and easier to follow, you can organize your project using keyframe animation and a timeline. Then all you need to do is position your image on the canvas and manipulate the timeline. The software will interpolate the motion between positions for you to create a smooth-flowing, graceful transition from one movement to the next. Anime Studio creates animations up to two minutes long, but if you need unlimited length, take a look at the Pro version. Once you complete a project, you can finish it for web, TV, film and still formats. With Anime Studio you can output your finished work to a variety of standard formats, such as AVI, MOV, and Flash (SWF export for vector based animations).

Animation Techniques
Traditional animation was created by drawing frames one after another, each frame drawn slightly different from the last. Anime Studio helps you simulate frame-by-frame animation, yet drastically reduces the time required from traditional animation. Designed to mimic real skeletal structure, the Anime Studio bones are interdependent, so when you adjust one bone all the other connected bones will move in response. The bone-rigging feature also uses spring-like simulation to calculate dynamic bone movement. This makes a wide range of movements seem real, such as jumping, waving flabby body parts, and bouncing hair. You can also take advantage of Anime Studio's Switch Layers function to work with a combination of connected movements that occur along a timeline. This is particularly valuable for animating body movements or facial expressions, such as lip-synch animations, when each graphical layer can be a mouth shape for a different sound.

Sound and Special FX
Anime Studio allows you to add a soundtrack to your animations, including lip-synching. You can import sound clips into our project and adjust the timing and length to fit your scene. This program includes a free copy of Papagayo lip-synching software. Papagayo will break audio dialogue files down to their basic sound elements called phonemes.

Anime Studio then allows you to lip-synch based on these phonemes. Besides adding sound to your project, Anime Studio allows you to add a variety of special effects to your animation. With Anime Studios you can customize colors and fills for your objects using the style palette, or add line effects such as shaded, soft edge, splotchy, spots, halo, and gradients.

You can also manipulate the camera around your scene to create action and drama in your projects. For example, you can use script commands to call in pre-made particle effects like smoke or explosions. You can also make your own styles by saving your favorite sets of effects for use later. Other effects allow you to draw with pattern brushes, create perspective shadows with Anime Studio's layer masking feature, create glows and outlines, and use particle layers to create a flurry of flying objects.

Anime Studio includes over 60 sample files that make it easy to get up to speed so you can start creating your own animations quickly. Samples serve as starting points, or explore them to learn more about the richness of Anime Studio. This program includes anime characters, Aya and Winsor, backgrounds, animation, other characters, scenery, and props.

Product Description

Create your own cartoons and animations with Anime Studio, the software for animation enthusiasts of all levels. From hobbyists making cut-out animations, to professionals who work in video and film, Anime Studio is easy enough for digital enthusiasts to create their own animations using digital photos, yet powerful enough for demanding animators to create their own 2D movies. Included content can get you started quickly, plus Anime Studio’s use of skeleton manipulation is a huge timesaver over traditional hand drawn animation that typically requires a team of animators! Use the drawing and coloring tools, or import 2D art, export to QT, AVI & SWF.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars it's okay, October 28, 2007

By	D. Thwing "digital head" (MT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Well depending on what you are looking to do with it, it's an okay piece of animation software. However there are a few key things to be aware of. First off there is quite a learning curve to this software, and no printed manual comes with it, so I found it to be difficult to learn-relying on tutorial and web manuals isn't my thing). The provided content is very limited despite how the description above sounds. Most of the characters aren't even anime style but more like real primitive toons. The anime figures that do come with the software aren't even produced inside anime studio but are rather Photoshop type objects that are very limited as to what they can and will do for you. Also these don't serve as good examples as to how to even make your own characters. I found the interface confusing and the vector drawing tools to be very limited and of poor quality. It's fun to play with and to learn about animation but producing anything of quality might be more difficult than with other software, even freeware that's out there and available. In my limited opinion it's just written up better than it delivers.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Does what it says it will do, but what is that exactly?, July 15, 2008

By	boysinbooks (ebay, USA) - See all my reviews

Because of the low price of this software, many people probably buy it thinking it is some simple-minded easy way to make cartoons that even a kid could use. No, that isn't what it is.

What this software does is allow you to take a drawing - of a man or a horse or a worm or a machine - and add "bones" to it. You can then manipulate the bones to manipulate the drawing, in effect turning the drawing into a puppet. And because the bones are all connected together, when you move one you move the rest. So if you move the "hand" bone, the arm moves with it. If you move the thigh bone, then the foot follows along. Therefore you can make your puppet man walk just by moving the appropriate bones.

To animate him you could move the bones a little bit for each frame, but this program is more powerful than that. You can create "key frames" where the bones are in extreme positions, for instance full stride in a walk and then perhaps the point where the legs are crossing in the walk, and then the program will "interpolate" the in-between frames for you. You set up 2 or 3 frames of a walk cycle and end up with 12 or 15 thanks to the software. You can define repeating cycles of frames which also saves time.

It is NOT "easy" to use. You have to think about what you are doing. You have to learn how the program works. On-screen tutorials with video clips explain every tool and a complete help manual is always available while the program is running.

Prepare to spend several hours learning how to use it. You will probably find it too difficult to use for any animation longer than a minute or two. You can add sound. You can import your own backgrounds. You can import a video clip and use it as a guide. You can import animations you did previously and build up the complexity. I had a horse pulling a cart across the screen left to right while plants were waving their leaves and a man walking across the screen right to left and it was getting to be too much for me to manage. The more there is on screen then the more complicated it is to manage it all.

One hassle is that you cannot see what some special effects look like until AFTER you render them to a video clip. That's just a limitation of Anime Studio 5 because it's really an introduction to Anime Studio Pro which does render everything in real time. I'm debating now whether to upgrade to Pro, but first I want to investigate Toon Boom and some other programs.

The output of Anime Studio 5 is very clean (because of the vectors) and suitable for animated logos and flash-like cartoon sequences. And it has a lip-synch feature so you could create an animated face for a web page that said "Hello! Come on in!" or whatever. It has a Flash output but I stuck with Quicktime for everything I did. You have complete control over frame rate, image size, and video quality.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I find this product very worth the money., December 28, 2007

By	Manuel C. Hernandez "fromthewoods" (Deer River, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The one thing that is not made clear in most reviews of this anime creator is that first: The animation software is for people that have worked with some kind of animation software before or have worked with such products as PhotoShop. And those folks should understand a bit of the basic premise of animation production. This is a software package that is made to introduce folks to a product of modest price (compared to high-end products) that will allow you to do TV production scale animations, and the proof is in the examples at e-Frontier's website. I upgraded to Anime Studio Pro 5.5 because the Anime Studio which I bought at Target (and got a complete and FREE upgrade on the website (with registration) to the 5.5 version of the intro package) did what it was supposed to do... show me what was possible with the software. It works with a couple of really fine Adobe products as well... PhotoShop, Illustrator and Flash CS3 Pro... all of which I personally own. And it works in scripted form as well! You just have to understand some basic levels of programming. No, not everyone will like the application, granted. In my honest opinion you should grab this software at this very reasonable price and USE IT! You won't be sorry! Unless you have or want to spend 3K for Maya 8.5 (which is for commercial high end render-farm studios,) but really for a small desktop shop that isn't as much fun or as easy to use as Anime Studio! For the money that makes this product worth it. I intend to use this product to teach animation courses to beginners in the near future.