eFrontier Anime Studio Pro (Win/Mac)

Easily create characters and objects.	Use layering behaviors that are similar to other design programs.
A wealth of tools at your fingertips.	Using keyframes and a timeline, test your animations as you design.
Bone-rigging uses spring-like simulation to calculate dynamic character movement.	Vector-based tools make quick designs easy.
Give your characters a voice with Papagayo lip-synching software.	Create sophisticated special effects.

This program includes everything aspiring artists need to create top quality animations from start to finish -- it simplifies the animation process and empowers artists to create their projects faster and easier than ever before. You'll be surprised by how quickly you can get started. Packed with ready-to-use anime style characters you can create your own animations right out of the box. Tutorials and sample files show you how to maximize Anime Studio Pro's powerful features giving you the jump start you'll need to begin your first project.

Once you feel at home with the mechanics of the software, you'll be ready to move on to your own art. Sketch your original characters and backdrops, scan in and import graphics, or if you use a pen tablet you can recreate the sensation of drawing on paper. Built with vector graphics, Anime Studio Pro 5 provides power and flexibility with multiple layering and the capacity to resize images without sacrificing quality. Another powerful element of Anime Studio Pro 5 is the use of "bones." Using the software's bone rigging system you can add a skeleton to any image to bring it to life.

With Anime Studio Pro 5 there is no need to create new art for each individual frame as you animate -- just adjust the bones to your desired position and the program will generate the movement for you. You can also count on Anime Studio Pro 5 to help direct your animated action with an intuitive timeline. Setting your movements to a timeline makes scene changes feel seamless and natural, so the plot of your animated short is easier to follow. No animation is complete without an audio soundtrack. Anime Studio Pro 5 helps you add emotion and style to your animations by adding sound in WAV and AIFF formats. And once you've completed a project, you can publish your results for a variety of media, including video, TV, and web formats.

Design and Layout
Anime Studio Pro 5 gives you total control over your canvas and makes it easy for you to organize and complete your project using layers. With this intuitive software under your belt you can set up your 2D canvas to the exact dimensions you want. And with Anime Studio Pro you can even turn your canvas into a 3D stage with X, Y, and Z coordinates to easily produce your animation with added depth and dimension. Using Anime Studio Pro's vector-based graphics you can freely adjust canvas resolution and size without losing image quality.

If you're already accustomed to other graphics-driven programs, such as Photoshop or Quark, you'll be pleased with Anime Studio Pro's familiar layer-based workflow. It is an easy and efficient way to organize your assets and create your animation, and you'll save time by reusing your art. Simply create an asset once and place it on a layer, then refer to that layer any time you need to reuse a piece of art. Advanced layer features include Switch Layers which allows you to rotate among all the layers in a set and shows only one layer a time. This saves you a great deal of time when animating body movements or facial expressions. Use Anime Studio Pro to rig your characters, objects and scenes with the revolutionary bone system that makes the animation process easier than ever before. Bones create a skeleton that determines joints or flex points in your artwork. You can then manipulate the bones to move the image into new positions without time-consuming redraws.

Once you complete a project, you can finish it for web, TV, film and still formats. With Anime Studio Pro you can output your finished work to a variety of standard formats, such as AVI, MOV, and Flash (SWF export for vector based animations). Studio Pro also makes it easy to transfer your work to other popular graphics programs to utilize assets for other projects or to add color to your art. Pro exports to JPG, BMP, PNG, an TGA file formats and even allows you to export your artwork as layered PSD files.

Animation Techniques
Traditional animation was created by drawing frames one after another, each frame drawn slightly different from the last. Anime Studio Pro helps you simulate frame-by-frame animation, yet drastically reduces the time required from traditional animation.

Designed to mimic real skeletal structure, the Anime Studio Pro bones are interdependent, so when you adjust one bone all the other connected bones will move in response. The bone-rigging feature also uses spring-like simulation to calculate dynamic bone movement. This makes a wide range of movements seem real, such as jumping, waving flabby body parts, and bouncing hair. You can also take advantage of Anime Studio Pro's Switch Layers function to work with a combination of connected movements that occur along a timeline. This is particularly valuable for animating body movements or facial expressions, such as lip-synch animations, when each graphical layer can be a mouth shape for a different sound.

An additional animation feature includes cycling keyframe interpolation which will automatically cycle a section of animation and repeat it over again as many times as you wish. Another feature includes onion skins that show the position of objects in your scene at a given point in time -- just click on any point in the timeline to see the onion skins in Anime Studio Pro. In Anime Studio Pro you can use Actions -- little clips of animation that are associated with a layer or group of layers -- to create reusable animations for movements that you expect to use repeatedly. Tweening adjusts the pace of movements within a given action, so you can slow it down or speed it up. And Pro's Graph mode allows you to inspect an animation curve plotted as values on a graph. This helps evaluate acceleration, changes in direction, and other properties of motion.

Anime Studio Pro includes over 200 sample files and is filled with content that includes the standard Anime Studio content files, such as anime characters, Aya and Winsor, backgrounds, animation, other characters, scenery and props. Anime Studio Pro also includes extra samples such as 3D animals, 3D movies, and samples provided by users that serve as great starting points.