eFrontier Anime Studio Pro (Win/Mac)

by eFrontier

Product Features

• Create your characters and objects by drawing or scanning directly into Anime Studio 5 Pro
• With bone-rigging, vector-based graphics, and layer-based workflow you can create animated shorts of any 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, or transfer your work to other popular graphics programs
• Anime Studio Pro 5 is compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000IK414I
• Item model number: ASP-C50-DE-R
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 2, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,083 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #35 in Software > Graphics > Animation
  • #85 in Software > Graphics > Illustration

Product Description

Amazon.com

efrontier's Anime Studio Pro 5 is a complete 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 Pro 5 to produce full-length animation for film, video, or streaming over the web.

It's easy to quickly create 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 Pro 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 Pro'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 Pro 5 provides power and flexibility with multiple layering and the capacity to resize images without sacrificing quality. Another powerful element of Anime Studio Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 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. And with Anime Studio Pro you can even turn your canvas into a 3D stage with X, Y, and Z coordinates to easily produce your animation with added depth and dimension. Using Anime Studio Pro's vector-based graphics you can freely adjust canvas resolution and size without losing image quality.

If you're already accustomed to other graphics-driven programs, such as Photoshop or Quark, you'll be pleased with Anime Studio Pro'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. Use Anime Studio Pro 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 Pro you 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. In Anime Studio Pro you can also fine tune your animations with powerful timeline controls, such as onion skins, tweening, and graph mode. And with the Pro version you can create animations of any length.

Once you complete a project, you can finish it for web, TV, film and still formats. With Anime Studio Pro you can output your finished work to a variety of standard formats, such as AVI, MOV, and Flash (SWF export for vector based animations). Studio Pro also makes it easy to transfer your work to other popular graphics programs to utilize assets for other projects or to add color to your art. Pro exports to JPG, BMP, PNG, an TGA file formats and even allows you to export your artwork as layered PSD files.

Animation Techniques
Traditional animation was created by drawing frames one after another, each frame drawn slightly different from the last. Anime Studio Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro'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.

An additional animation feature includes cycling keyframe interpolation which will automatically cycle a section of animation and repeat it over again as many times as you wish. Another feature includes onion skins that show the position of objects in your scene at a given point in time -- just click on any point in the timeline to see the onion skins in Anime Studio Pro. In Anime Studio Pro you can use Actions -- little clips of animation that are associated with a layer or group of layers -- to create reusable animations for movements that you expect to use repeatedly. Tweening adjusts the pace of movements within a given action, so you can slow it down or speed it up. And Pro's Graph mode allows you to inspect an animation curve plotted as values on a graph. This helps evaluate acceleration, changes in direction, and other properties of motion.

Anime Studio Pro includes over 200 sample files and is filled with content that includes the standard Anime Studio content files, such as anime characters, Aya and Winsor, backgrounds, animation, other characters, scenery and props. Anime Studio Pro also includes extra samples such as 3D animals, 3D movies, and samples provided by users that serve as great starting points.

Product Description

Create professional animations from start to finish with Anime Studio Pro, the all-in-one solution for creating anime, cartoon and cut out animations. Anime Studio Pro’s unique point-and-click rigging with bones quickly animates 2D imagery into dramatic life! Start from megabytes of included content, work in vector-based layers, choose from professional special effects and scripting to help create animations of any length, fine-tune your animations with timeline controls. Photoshop integration to import 2D art or use draw/coloring tools, import 3D imagery (OBJ), AVI and QuickTime, add WAV and AIFF soundtracks, export stills in 2D or layered PSD files, and animations as QuickTime, AVI or SWF.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Three, February 22, 2007

By 

E. March (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: eFrontier Anime Studio Pro (Win/Mac) (CD-ROM)

When it comes to 2D animation software, your choices are 1) Anime Studio for Windows and Mac OS X, 2) Toon Boom, for Win & Mac, and 3) KToon for Linux. Both of the other two are cell based animation where you draw the same character over and over in a new cell moving body parts as you go. I personally find this tedious and redundant. Anime uses the bone concept found in 3D programs that bends the vector shaped

drawing with the bones as you move them. You only need to set key frames. So this means all the frames between the key frames you set are calulated by the computer and you do not have to re-draw them. It lets the computer work for you, not just be a painting tool. While cell animation seems to bring traditional paper/pen artwork concepts to ther computer, the computer is not working for you as much as it is with the bone concept.

If you buy from Amazon you get the MAC & WIN version on the same CDROM, if you download from the manufacturer you get only one version.

The hardest part of character animation is lip-sync'ing, Magie Pro alone is as much as this software, this comes with Papagayo which is open source. I had to find an old Papagayo for my older Mac OS X version 10.3.9. I also use the built in amplitude lip syncing because is 'good enough' with out worring too much about the exact sounds. Less mouth flapping is sometimes better.

This is a wonderful program, a bit ahead of its time, and very stable.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars $27 for the student discount, April 6, 2007

By 

Celeste Thoms "Moviemaker330" (Rochester,NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: eFrontier Anime Studio Pro (Win/Mac) (CD-ROM)

I think people have said enough great things about the program, and I agree with them all. But what I want customers to know, if you can get a student discount (you're a student, someone you know is a student, or faculty) you can get it for $27 and the Pro version is $94 at places like academic superstore.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Vector animation tool, November 5, 2006

By 

Brett McCoy "Programmer by Day, Musician by N... (Germantown, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: eFrontier Anime Studio Pro (Win/Mac) (CD-ROM)

Formerly known as Moho, this is an easy to use vector animation tool... but don't be fooled, it has some very powerful features such as layers, skeletal animation, lip synch, and even supports 3D camera motion and importation of 3D objects (although this is not a 3D animation tool like Maya).

One recommendation I will make for new users to Anime Studio -- learn some basic animation techniques such as squash and stretch, walk cycles, etc. It will improve your animations tenfold. Check out some of the films done by Grey Kid, they have really raised the bar on 2D vector animation almost to the level of traditional cel animation.

I'm hoping to see further development on Anime Studio, now that it has more commercial viability since it has been bought by e-frontier. And a Linux version is coming soon also.