I use [1] Flash CS3 Professional and [2] After Effects CS3 for my two-dimensional animations, most of which involve text and image animations for multimedia presentations. My weakness is character animations, especially with the illusion of three dimensions. I have a copy of [3] Strata 3D CX but have yet to master it. However, I’ve had another application also waiting on my hard drive for a review, [4] e frontier’s [5] Anime Studio Pro 5, and it’s an excellent 2D application that offers an intuitive way to animate a variety of character designs and environments and create engaging cartoon and character animations. It also has some 3D capabilities I will explore later in this review.

Why Anime?

I don’t know why Anime Studio Pro 5 has “anime” in its name—it seems that word would lead people to believe this application is for [6] otaku who know the difference between the [7] XXG-01D2 Gundam Deathscythe Hell and the Deathscythe Hell Custom from [8] Endless Waltz. Anyway, ASP5 can animate a lot more than anime: it also can create great professional animations with cartoons, cut-out figures, shaded figures (think pencil drawings) and more. You can even work with photos, which is pretty cool. I think e frontier does the application a little disservice by throwing “anime” into its name, though I’m sure the anime niche is easier to secure a dominant position than the full animation niche.

Great Artwork Makes For Great Animations

I’ve always thought the hardest part of the computer-generated animation process was actually the drawing of the artwork, not necessarily the animation of it. If your art doesn’t look great, it doesn’t matter how smooth the animation is or how life-like: your final product will look a bit amateurish. Great animators will spend a lot of time drawing their vector graphics and get them looking good before the animating, and ASP5 has all the tools to accomplish this. It can important pretty much any format you can throw at it, so you can draw your materials in Illustrator if you like and bring it into ASP5. It also accepts all the major bitmap formats, including layered PSD, and even accepts some media files such as WAV and MOV, though they are platform-specific.

ASP5 boasts a large set of vector tools that can do many things Illustrator can do; the only things missing are some Illustrator-specific tools such as the symbol tools. The toolbox itself is well-organized and I was making some simple shapes and figures right away.

Bone Rigging Is Awesome

Adobe recently added a puppet figure function to After Effects CS3 that allows you to grab points of a figure and animate them. However, ASP5’s bone rigging system did it first and it makes animating very easy. It’s similar to the After Effects puppet function but each bone has two ends—a pivot point and a moving point—and bones are related to one another depending on the order you draw them. For instance, drawing bones in an arm from the shoulder down to the hand will allow for proper arm movement; draw them out of order and your arm will move like Plastic Man’s.

Once the bones are in place, you bind the vector points with the proper bones and then use the Manipulate Bones tool to move them around. The time it takes to build a bone structure and begin moving it around is lightning-fast: I grabbed some tutorial files that came with ASP5 and, within five minutes or so, I was animating a full figure. Like I said earlier, the hard part is actually drawing all the elements. Bone rigging is easy enough that a teenager could do it if he’s computer-savvy and can learn from a video tutorial.

You’ll notice that I mentioned tutorials and files in the paragraph above. ASP5 ships with a lot of good material, both finished and unfinished, including two anime figures (one male, one female) that are all set for animating. You don’t need to start from scratch if you don’t want to.

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.

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