Anime Studio Debut 6 (Mac/PC CD)

*First impression
**How the program works/ comparison to Adobe Flash & Illustrator
***Additional on-line material recommendations
****Pro's and Con's
*****Final impression

*There seems to be a never-ending supply of 2D vector-based animation softwares competing for our artistic dollars. And, from a casual look at quite a few of them, they all are pretty similar in producing South Park-quality movies. The more recent seems to be geared toward emulating Manga graphics, however.

Anime Studio "Debut" is the novice/ intermediate version of their professional version, Anime Studio "Pro." Although I've always loved animation and have wanted for quite sometime to take my illustrations and incorporate them into a movie form, I just didn't have the time to investigate where and what would be a fitting investment for me. And, like Poser 8 that I just received, both programs and a slew of similar titles in both 2D animation (Anime Studio) and 3D animation (Poser), were produced by SmithMicro. What I found with both titles and especially Anime Studio is that the interface is crowded. It seems as if it is a company wide decision to put all of the tabs and settings and drop
down configuration right on the opening/ default screen. This makes it, visually, a little intimidating and reinforces the notion that these programs have a very high learning curve
to use all of the functions that are available. Is there a way to have all of the functions but not crowding out the workspace? Well, yes. Adobe's done a great job of redesigning a
minimalist interface that allows one to go to the header and engage just the desirable options. If there are too many and space is a premium, with the Adobe suite, one can easily collapse and move around without any hassles. That would have been a good idea here.

**I like Anime Studio "Debut 6," nevertheless. I searched around for people who've worked with previous versions of Anime Studio to get a feel for what experienced users are bringing to the table. And, what I found was quite impressive. There are quite a few 5-
minute cartoon clips on Youtube created by using Anime Studio.
Anime Studio is a cross between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Flash, but about 95% off. It's a steal, learning curve and all, at around $25. Anime Studio works in the same way as Flash. There's a canvas and various tools that you can create basic shapes. The tools, which are many, occupy the left, header and right of the canvas. Below the canvas is the timeline. Creating an image, setting a keyframe, readjusting the original artwork are the essentials here just as in Flash.

***The software comes with 3 brief (and, I mean very brief) introductory tutorials and a pdf of what tools do what. What I did in addition to looking for a final project was to download a tutorial series, run it through iMovie and compress it into one 90-minute movie (I did the exact same thing for Poser.) It helped a lot.

I'd also like to recommend, a great book w/ a cd-rom, How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS4: The Art of Design and Animation by Chris Georgenes. In this book, Georgenes lays out about 2 dozen basic to professional ways to
create cartoons in Flash. Since, in my opinion, Anime Studio is an extremely inexpensive version of Flash, then this book may prove to be worth its weight in gold.

****Pro's
+Inexpensive
+Takes up less than 500 MB of space
+Attractive, but brief tutorials
+Two (2) separate discs to install on Mac and Windows OS's.
+Many on-line supplementary tutorials and many finished products shows the potential of this program has in creative hands.

Con's
-Interface is cluttered and visually intimidating
-Program has a high learning curve (this is not necessarily a bad thing)
-Company could have supplied multiple examples of real world users who succeeded with the program.

*****Overall, Anime Studio "Debut 6" is a great program to have and if one can get over the learning curve and cluttered interface, it may prove to be a better investment than
Adobe Flash.

One of my housemates suggested, after all our random conversations and musings, that these get recorded in some form for others to laugh at too. I watch a lot of movies and write the odd script, which rarely reaches completion, so it would feel good to just "go mad" every once in a while: really get those creative feelings to the surface.

Anime Studio goes some way towards providing the resources for achieving this desire, to create short, experimental and disposable animations for the internet community. Now CS Flash (whatever the technical words actually mean) is like a foreign language for beginners like me, so to have access to a friendly interface with a timeline, work area and complex tutorials to get stuck into, suddenly the task seemed less scary. If you're a regular user of both Windows Movie Maker and Photoshop-esque software, then you'll likely feel at home in Anime Studio.

All I can say, compared to the price and learning curve of fully-fledged Flash software is simply, give it a go; either for yourself or as a Christmas present for someone creative/geeky/patient.

Purchased a used anime studio 6 last week and it just got delivered today. Tried to install the program 4 times on my laptop (Windows) which studio 6 is meant to be compatible with. Laptop has crashed every time I hit the install button. Never had any problems installing any other program (its a brand new laptop). Don't understand why it isn't working and can only deduce anime studio is corrupted. Only customer support available is in the US as stated on the user manual. No UK contact details have been provided with delivery and can't find any on Amazon.uk-not remotely impressed.