I’m not sure if this is the right place to post, mods please move if it would be better elsewhere. I have actually made an animation with Anime Studio Debut and I have tentatively linked to it so I'm hoping this is the correct forum.
I bought Anime Studio Debut 10 recently because I am looking at ways to put together clear, instructional videos. I know that isn’t exactly what most people probably have in mind when they think of animation software – no clever cartoons or characters to see here.
But I had a little project to do, and I wanted to get an idea across – one of the first things I thought of was the old Powerpoint presentation. However Powerpoint didn’t provide the right tools to really demonstrate the ideas the way I wanted to.
Having used Flash a long time ago, I knew that I wanted something that could do vector animation, particularly morphing. Various review sites lead me to Anime Studio Debut.
I’m glad they did. It provided almost exactly the functionality I wanted, and for a price that can only be described as extremely reasonable.
My video is on this site: http://www.thebestmattressforyourback.com and I am hoping to put up similar stuff there soon. It will all probably be equally dry stuff, about how the shape of a mattress matched the contours of the human body (enthralling!) but I’m hoping it can pay some bills.
What I liked was able to simulate something like Powerpoint but add so much more as well. So it was perhaps a different way to use the software, which gives it flexibility and adds value.
Initial thoughts, or feedback to the developers would be like this:
Good:
- The product worked flawlessly. Not a single crash, glitch or bug to be found. Nice.
- The animations worked seamlessly. Put in some keyframes, make some changes, and the program handles it all very smoothly. Nice.
- Most of the transition tools are very intuitive. Things like resizing, repositioning and rotating were just as easy as they should be.
- Exporting was nice and simple.
Frustrating:
- I didn’t like having a sample model open every time I ran the program. Lame and very irritating. The overall product is so well developed, that it seemed almost amateurish to have this user-unfriendly interference. (I hope that doesn't come across too harsh)
- I didn’t like the way that it seemed so hard to choose a colour when I wanted to draw a line. For me, drawing a line needs these basics – choose a thickness, choose a colour, draw. A bonus is choosing a style (like dotted line or whatever). This should be really, really easy to do in this kind of program but it wasn’t.
- I wanted to break up my project into a couple of different files to work on separately, then to just add them together at the end – if there was a way to do this, then I didn’t work it out.
- I added audio after I did the animation, and found that I wanted to shift lots of the timeline at once, and preferably on multiple layers at once – again, if there was a way to do this, then I didn’t work it out.
- I wanted to draw a line on something that had been transitioned. I couldn’t draw it though, as the transition was late in the timeline, and I could only draw at frame 0… it took a bit of messing around to get the effect I needed.
I’m really glad I bought this, and would highly recommend it to anyone else looking for a great animation tool (I've already tried to convince my brother that he needs it). At the price for the Debut version it is impressive value.
I’ll try to update this thread (or make a new one) when I add some more animations to that site, or if I make some other (hopefully actually interesting) ones.
I goof around a bit with illustrations, and have even had a short, hand drawn animated movie shown at a local cinema (I don’t have a copy, and wasn’t proud of it so I wouldn’t show anyone anyway) so hopefully I can get the time to do something worth showing. Some of my pics are here: http://users.on.net/~bandkrichards/
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the great product
Brendan
