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Anime Studio 5 Win/Mac Review
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Manufacturer: Smith Micro Software Inc.
Find all Smith Micro Software Inc. reviews
ESRB Rating:
Platform(s): Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Mac OS X
Release Date: October 30, 2006
Average Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
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Retail Price: $49.99
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User Submitted Anime Studio 5 Win/Mac Reviews
Date: 2008-12-28
Great program to learn how to draw cartoon art on your computer !
Easy to download enclosed CD program . Easy to use . No problems .You can make a moving cartoon and add your on sound .
Date: 2008-10-26
can't register; says invalid serial number (bought at Target!)
Should have 0 stars. I just bought Anime Studio 5 at Target yesterday. I wanted to use it to make animations for use in my classroom. Unfortunately, when I entered the serial number on the sleeve, the program said, "invalid serial number." I tried many more times to enter the serial number, in case I'd made a mistake. I got the same error message. So there's 50 bucks down the drain. Can't return opened software to Target, of course. What a rip off! Ironically, I was able to register it via their website, with the given serial number. Still, it only wants to run the trial or I have to "buy" it again.
Date: 2008-10-18
Great animation
was a gift for my son to use with his tablet - he really likes the features
Date: 2008-07-15
Does what it says it will do, but what is that exactly?
Because of the low price of this software, many people probably buy it thinking it is some simple-minded easy way to make cartoons that even a kid could use. No, that isn't what it is.
What this software does is allow you to take a drawing - of a man or a horse or a worm or a machine - and add "bones" to it. You can then manipulate the bones to manipulate the drawing, in effect turning the drawing into a puppet. And because the bones are all connected together, when you move one you move the rest. So if you move the "hand" bone, the arm moves with it. If you move the thigh bone, then the foot follows along. Therefore you can make your puppet man walk just by moving the appropriate bones.
To animate him you could move the bones a little bit for each frame, but this program is more powerful than that. You can create "key frames" where the bones are in extreme positions, for instance full stride in a walk and then perhaps the point where the legs are crossing in the walk, and then the program will "interpolate" the in-between frames for you. You set up 2 or 3 frames of a walk cycle and end up with 12 or 15 thanks to the software. You can define repeating cycles of frames which also saves time.
It is NOT "easy" to use. You have to think about what you are doing. You have to learn how the program works. On-screen tutorials with video clips explain every tool and a complete help manual is always available while the program is running.
Prepare to spend several hours learning how to use it. You will probably find it too difficult to use for any animation longer than a minute or two. You can add sound. You can import your own backgrounds. You can import a video clip and use it as a guide. You can import animations you did previously and build up the complexity. I had a horse pulling a cart across the screen left to right while plants were waving their leaves and a man walking across the screen right to left and it was getting to be too much for me to manage. The more there is on screen then the more complicated it is to manage it all.
One hassle is that you cannot see what some special effects look like until AFTER you render them to a video clip. That's just a limitation of Anime Studio 5 because it's really an introduction to Anime Studio Pro which does render everything in real time. I'm debating now whether to upgrade to Pro, but first I want to investigate Toon Boom and some other programs.
The output of Anime Studio 5 is very clean (because of the vectors) and suitable for animated logos and flash-like cartoon sequences. And it has a lip-synch feature so you could create an animated face for a web page that said "Hello! Come on in!" or whatever. It has a Flash output but I stuck with Quicktime for everything I did. You have complete control over frame rate, image size, and video quality.
Date: 2007-12-28
I find this product very worth the money.
The one thing that is not made clear in most reviews of this anime creator is that first: The animation software is for people that have worked with some kind of animation software before or have worked with such products as PhotoShop. And those folks should understand a bit of the basic premise of animation production. This is a software package that is made to introduce folks to a product of modest price (compared to high-end products) that will allow you to do TV production scale animations, and the proof is in the examples at e-Frontier's website. I upgraded to Anime Studio Pro 5.5 because the Anime Studio which I bought at Target (and got a complete and FREE upgrade on the website (with registration) to the 5.5 version of the intro package) did what it was supposed to do... show me what was possible with the software. It works with a couple of really fine Adobe products as well... PhotoShop, Illustrator and Flash CS3 Pro... all of which I personally own. And it works in scripted form as well! You just have to understand some basic levels of programming. No, not everyone will like the application, granted. In my honest opinion you should grab this software at this very reasonable price and USE IT! You won't be sorry! Unless you have or want to spend 3K for Maya 8.5 (which is for commercial high end render-farm studios,) but really for a small desktop shop that isn't as much fun or as easy to use as Anime Studio! For the money that makes this product worth it. I intend to use this product to teach animation courses to beginners in the near future.
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