REVIEW: Anime Studio Pro 5 Works For Anime And Animation (Page 2)

Exporting And Other Features

Once you have your artwork animated, it’s time to build and export a movie clip! All the necessary features are here, such as an easy-to-use timeline that tweens automatically, a camera to change perspective during the animation, and the ability to export to various formats including those for movies (MOV, AVI, SWF [vectors only]) and bitmaps (sequential JPEG, PSD, PNG and more). Working with timelines and cameras take quite a bit of time, but only because it’s a time-intensive process anyway. ASP5 makes it as easy and painless as possible and I had no problem exporting to a variety of formats.

Other cool features include:

• Audio support: You can add music and sound effects to your animations.
• Pen tablet support: ASP5 will take input from any graphic pen tablet, a real bonus for animators who like the pencil-on-paper feel.
• Actions: Animations can be stored and reused with no fuss, in the same way Flash CS3 can store movie clips as reusable symbols.
• Filters: ASP5 calls them scripts, but they function the same way as Photoshop’s filters. There aren’t many ASP5 scripts compared to Photoshop’s filter library, but there are several cool ones (try anything in Particle Effects, the Perspective Shadow or Bone Audio Wiggle!)
• 3D support: ASP5 can work with Strata 3D objects or its own 3D material and create three-dimensional movies. Strata is still your best bet when it comes to 3D work but ASP5 is robust enough with 3D to have a lot of fun and make some impressive work.

Some Things I’d Like To Change

The functionality of ASP5 is excellent, but there are some things about the application itself that I would like to see improved. Most of these ideas come from my experience with Adobe applications:

• Open Recent. I am always re-opening files, and Adobe has a list of the most recent files in the File menu. ASP5 doesn’t offer this.
• Multiple open documents. ASP5 allows only one file to be open at a time. Sometimes this isn’t a problem, but if you are moving elements from one file to another then it can be a hassle. It shouldn’t be hard to allow the application to work with multiple open documents.
• Workspaces. The ability to fine-tune one’s working environment is what makes good user interfaces great. Adobe apps have allowed multiple workspaces for years, but ASP5 does not—probably because there are only five palettes available in the whole application, which I think can be increased with new features (how about a Scripts palette? Render Preview palette?). ASP5 has great tools but it could have even more—look at After Effects and Flash.
• A cooler, more streamlined interface. I’m not sure other designers feel the same way, but my first impression of an application is created by the way the application looks—and this is dictated by the palettes, tools and other “chrome.” Graphics applications have come a long way from ten years ago—remember SuperPaint’s Tornado tool? It seems very childish now when compared with Photoshop’s various tools, most of them derived from professional photographer’s tools. ASP5 doesn’t suffer from anything like the Tornado tool but the fat colored tool buttons and the bare-bones Layers palette makes the application feel less than professional. If e frontier wanted to position this product further up the professional application food chain, it would go a long way by tweaking the interface design to match the application’s sophistication.

Conclusion

Anime Studio Pro 5 would be a wonderful Christmas gift if you have a son or daughter interested in animating and already knowledgeable about computers. If you are a professional animator, ASP5 would work well for cartoon animations of any kind or size—though there are other, more professional applications out there for this. If you animate with Flash, I think ASP5 has a leg up in terms of pure animating features but it doesn’t have any kind of scripting environment like Flash does—it’s not that kind of program. ASP5 is designed for drawing, animating and exporting to a movie format—and not much more than that.

I like an application that finds its niche and does it well.

Anime Studio Pro 5
e frontier
Rating: 8/10
Price: $200/Upgrade: $150