Depth of Options
There is a wide variety of options for animating packed into ASP5. While you can buy a lot of quality content online for this program, at places like Renderosity, it is simple to create a lot of your own content. The drawing tools are sophisticated enough to give you a lot of control and there are a number of import options to let you bring Illustrator files and photo formats like .BMP, .JPG, and .PNG. Once you have your content in your scene, you can thread a skeleton of “Bones” to your animation. Bones allow segments of your object to move in a realistic way, keeping certain areas straight, while allowing joints to bend via reverse kinematics, which makes animation so much easier. While this is useful for character animation, you can even put a string of small bones into bushes, smoke clouds, and whips, to give them very fluid, serpentine movement.
Anime Studio Pro 5 uses floating, tablet-style controls.
After you have animated your scene to the point where you are pleased with it, you can add a variety of stylized filters to your animation, like a well-created particle effects generator for explosions, transporter effects, and wormholes. Once you’re done with it, and have added any music, effects, and voice tracks you like, you can export your completed work into a variety of formats from motion formats like Flash, .AVI, and QT to still formats like .BMP and .JPG. Further, if you want to take the time to master the program’s 3D cameras and distances, you can actually render your finished animation in Stereoglyphic 3D and make your own 3D film. This is a nice feature because 3D is becoming much more popular now that movies like Beowulf and The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D are making such a splash.
While there are many things this software can do, one of the things it can’t do is import Photoshop Layered documents. While many might use this program just for vector animation, I found that this program does a nice job on photo animation, with a little creativity, and quite honestly, it is easier to use for this sort of work than After Effects CS3’s puppet tool. While the actual use of bones for the animation of photo layers is much easier to use, its lack of Photoshop Layered import required me to export each layer from my Photoshop document as a separate transparency-preserved .PNG. Hopefully a future version of this program will add this useful feature, especially since ASP5 will already let you export out the footage as a layered Photoshop .PSD!
While ASP5 has a much more vector-based feel to it,
with some creativity it can yield a pseudo hand-drawn look.
Performance
Our test machine for this review was our 1.86 GHz Core2 Duo with XP Pro x64, 3 Gigs of RAM, and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 graphics card (provided by NVIDIA). In this setup, Animé Studio worked amazingly fast, even when dealing with large photographic imports. However, the program is designed to be able to work with very diminutive computers that have processor speeds as low as 500 MHz, which have only 256 MB of RAM. As it is also available for both Mac & PC, there should be no reason you won’t be able to use this program in your animation endeavors.
To supplement its modest requirements (which allow it to perform at lightening speeds on newer machines) it is also very stable. I do not think I had it crash once in the time we tested it, which is impressive.
