I spent the last two years working on an award-winning animated documentary, Freedom Dance, doing most of the animation in After Effects and Lightwave for some 3D vehicle, ship, and bird animation. Somehow, in all that laborious work, I had never come across Anime Studio Pro. Now that I’ve had a chance to thoroughly review the most recent incarnation, I realize how much it would have made my life simpler on this film! It's bone based vector and image animation tools would have saved me a tremendous amount of time.
This character comes with the software.
From the opening of the software, I was favorably impressed by this 2D animation program. Even though it was clearly a PC based program to begin with, it worked very well on my Mac G5. There is a PDF quick start tutorial and another PDF manual with more tutorials. Although I had to translate the PC keystrokes to Mac, the tutorials were fairly easy to follow. There were a couple of places where I initially had problems, but upon going back and rereading the text more carefully I was able to find my way through them. I was also able to find a number of additional tutorials on the Anime Studio website (http://my.smithmicro.com/win/animepro/index.html) which also had links to more videos on YouTube. There is a huge base of users of this product out there!
Ease of Use
Animation is not easy, but Anime Studio Pro goes a long way to make it easier. I had done a lot of cartoon animation in After Effects, which is a great program and I love it, but now that I have Studio Pro I will probably do most of the character animation in ASP.
Using the drawing tools.
The drawing tools in ASP are different from what I've used in the past in Illustrator and photoshop, but they do work pretty well once you get used to them. There are several floating tool palettes for drawing, filling, bones, layers, camera, and workspace. There is another palette for layers, which is similar to Photoshop or Illustrator. You can rename things by double clicking on the layer and an info box will come up with a place to change the name and several tabs of things you can do with your layer including shadows, motion blur, masking, and vectors. The fill and line tools are a little different compared to software I have used and they took a little getting used to, but there is a wonderful thick and thin line tool, which allows you to change the thickness of the line at every point. Very powerful and it gives a nice organic look to your art. There is also a palette for scaling and rotating the layer with a resettable pivot point. This works much easier than the Photoshop tools, which are buried in a side menu. The quick start guide takes you through all the drawing tools and shows you how to use the layers, build a background, etc. Very nice for someone new to animation and easier for an old hand to learn Anime Studio Pro.
I spent the last two years working on an award-winning animated documentary, 
