Anime Studio Pro 8 (PC/Mac)

I've provided a quick animation that I made with this software. Hopefully to give an idea of what anime studio is capable of. (Yes I'm a Mario obsessed fan XD)

Anime studio is an impressive animation tool that shouldn't be overlooked. I find it does just about everything I could personally want out of an animating application. Of course there are a few niggles here and there but they're not enough to ruin the product. I'll just list some main points:

First thing, the general User Interface isn't straightforward and will take some time to understand. Fortunately the anime studio community are very nice and offer help and tutorials. I tend to visit LostMarbles for most of my Q&A's

Being able to import adobe Photoshop files (all their individual layers) is a good feature and is very good if you want to do your art in Photoshop and then animate it in anime studio.

I've found masking works with no problem.

Rendering is good and I don't think it's actually crashed on me once yet! I usually output at 1080x1920 in QuickTime format and the picture looks pretty flawless.

Vector tools are nice and allow you to create smooth looking characters and images. Once again, the Drawing isn't straightforward and requires practice.

The physics engine can be a real time saver to people who want to animate things such as rain, snow, falling objects, smoke, water etc...
If you're like me though you'll just build virtual Jenga towers and make them collapse for your own simple amusement :D

Image files can be imported and manipulated for animations.

Layers have their own effects such as opacity, blur, shadow etc... all of which can be animated!

The bone rigging (which I've used for Mario in the video) works well and is quite fun, it's just like making a virtual puppet.

I could literally be here all day listing everything about Anime Studio. There's so much depth and I've only just scratched the surface. I'm loving this software so far and would recommend to anyone who wants to create flash styled animations on a budget.

I bought Anime Studio Pro for christmas last year. I've had plenty of 3D animation experience but this was my first attempt to use 2D animation software. I'm really impressed! The programme is very stable and crammed with useful tools and features. I don't know what the other reviewer was on about concerning masking. Masking is feature ridden and works closely with the excellent Anime Studio layers system. Thus masking will seems complex at first; you can arrange masks and layers to do just about anything you would expect a masking system to acheive.

Also rather than being a cheap, cheating way of adding features the ability to add functionality via scripts simply emphasises the professional nature of the software. Remember it is user added components that make Maya the 3D software of choice in many professional environments. In the short time I've been using Anime Studio Pro I have found the user community to be extremely friendly and helpful. There are plenty of interesting and useful scripts available, and plenty of help to use them. Anyway there is plenty that is built into the software to allow you to make great animations, and the ability to add scripted extra tools is just icing on the cake. Also, importantly, the quality of output obtainable from Anime Studio Pro is at a professional level.

The vector based drawing tools work really well, and layered photoshop images can be imported. Again the other reviewer should note that outlines (or curves, or lines if you like) are the basis all vector artwork, and other extremely expensive professional animation programmes use similar vector based methods. The lip syncing features are also excellent and are quick and easy to use. In fact quick and easy sums up this software for me.

Compared to other 2D animation products this is undoubtedly the best by far in it's price range.

this software is quite good on the surface but the technology used within isn't up to scratch, certainly not enough for it to be "Complete Animation for Professionals and Digital Artists" as the box claims.
much of the inadequacy will represent itself as a missing option, or something that can only be attained by downloading extra tools which have been created by users rather than being pre-installed.
the major problem being the masking technology adopted isn't accurate.
there is an update which reports to fix the masking "bug" but rather than fix it the update just sort of moves it around a bit, so the bug just displays in a different way. very annoying.
i've never encountered this problem with masks in other programs so wasn't aware that it might be an issue, i've written to the techy bods explaining the situation and i got a reply that says basically as far as they're aware it is fixed so the problem no longer exists and fixing it again will unlikely be happening: as it is i'm using 8.0 as the masking problem with that is less obvious when worked at in certain ways.
if you do use bones and masks then it's likely you'll be spending hours trying to rearrange the vectors so they appear in the correct place between frame zero bones and images.
also, if i were to read "complete" then discover it doesn't support animated gifs i'd be a bit upset about that.
it supports avi files on windows but not mac, but that's not really so much an issue maybe.

if i were to recommend something similar i would say Anime Studio Pro 7 is probably a safer purchase, i say this because i've discovered through reading and communicating with others these past weeks that this "bug" was never an issue before 8.
i've never used version 7 so can't say for sure, a lot of the people at the forums seems to think this sort of thing is just one of those challenges that you need to work-around, so if you do like a challenge and don't mind wasting your time and money too much then by all means buy it.

another thing whilst i'm on one, i don't find having to double click an option every time i want to select it as a fun thing to be doing, and why would you want to hear the error signal every time you render a preview?
yes, lots of puzzling mysteries to be discovered...
hoping it's just because it's still infantile but not holding my breath waiting for a useful update.

as far as smithmicro appear to be concerned, if it's been successfully installed then it works and if you're having problems with it then this can be resolved by asking someone else. they first sent me a link which directed me to a site that has extra tool on it, "handy" i thought, well that was until i installed the tools and discovered they just created there own error messages.

i should also mention that this software loves outlines, so if you're making something without outlines you'll find that you'll have to turn off the line after creating each vector unless you create the vector with the shape tool, in this case you'll have to option to click the box off for creating new shapes with lines.

bottom line, if you don't use masks: 6/10, if you do: -5/10, i haven't used version 7 but it's got to be better than this, if i could also get the time back that is spent trying to learn how to get around these issues i'd happily revert.