Software Review - Anime Studio Debut 9

About the Software

Everything you need to get started with 2-D animation

Anime Studio Debut is fun, easy, and exciting. It's a great tool for artistic expression and ideal for any age group. This entry-level animation software program is powerful yet affordable. You won't find your ideas or projects limited by the features of the software. Detailed video tutorials make learning the tools a snap, and pre-made content and characters help you get started right away.

Character Wizard Brand New Content
Hundreds of new characters. Quickly design ready-to-animate characters using the built-in Character Wizard. Select preset, dial-in body proportions, and choose from dozens of predesigned 2-D components such as hands, feet, mouths, eyes, noses, and heads.

Beginner's Mode
Start animating right away by choosing Beginner's Mode. Get exactly the help you need for each tool or feature with automatic roll over tips and built-in tutorials and sample files. You don't even have to leave the application to watch a video tutorial.

Rigging Your Characters Using Bones Makes Animating Easy
Bone-rigging is a fast and efficient alternative to tedious frame-by-frame animation. Add a skeleton to any image by pointing and clicking to create bones that overlay the parts of your image, to control arms or legs for example. Then bring your image to life by moving any individual bone point to create the pose or motion you want, while keeping your project organized with the sequencer and timeline.

Video/Motion Tracking
Add an object to an imported video that will follow the position and rotation of something, like a person's thumb. Just add tracking points that identify the item on the screen you want to follow.

Automatic Image Tracing Use Your Own Artwork
Import your scanned drawings or existing images and photos then convert them to vector drawings with the click of a button. Trace as black and white or edges only and adjust a number of settings to style your vector image. Color your vector art, resize without loss in image quality and animate it using bones.

Audio Recording, Sound Effects, and Automatic Lip Syncing
Add a soundtrack and lip-syncing to your animations. Record your own sound clips inside Anime Studio and adjust the pitch from high to low to fit your animated characters or import existing audio files into your project. Anime Studio will automatically insert them into your timeline, where you can adjust the timing and length to fit your scene. Using the Sequencer, freely move multiple sounds along the timeline to adjust syncing. Anime Studio supports WAV, AIFF, MP3 and M4A formats.

Huge Content Library Free Characters, Props, and Scenes Included
There is a huge variety of content included with Anime Studio, and the Pro version utilizes a powerful, flex-based Content Library, a great timesaver that allows you to organize content across Anime Studio projects. Browse through existing content, save your own creations to the library, and easily categorize content and search for items by keyword. Add selected content to your scenes through a simple drag and drop.

Lip-Syncing
Built-in lip-syncing in Anime Studio can help you save time. Simply load a sound file, and from the layer options of the layer you wish to sync, select the sound file from a pull-down menu. Anime Studio does the rest. Easily synchronize characters' lip and mouth movements to a sound file through a simple and intuitive process.

Enhanced, Powerful Drawing Tools; Easy-to-Use Automatic Effects
Customize colors and fills for your objects using the Style palette. Add line effects such as Shaded, Soft Edge, Halo, Image Texture, and Gradients. Apply a cartoon style effect to any image or video with a couple of mouse clicks. Easily select and remove unwanted background colors from your images using the Image Masking tool. Draw with pattern brushes and create perspective shadows with Anime Studio's layer masking feature.

Finish for Web, TV, Film, and Still Formats
Output finished animations to popular movie formats, including AVI, MOV, and Flash (SWF export for vector-based animations). Upload your creations directly to Facebook or YouTube. Gather up and organize all your project files in one location using the Gather Media feature.

Follow Path Tool
The Follow Path tool allows you to have any character or object follow and bend itself along a pre-drawn path (like a snake), making tons of animation possibilities easy.

Wacom Multi-Touch Support
Wacom Multi-Touch support allows you to use Wacom's new generation touch tablets with Anime Studio. Easily edit characters, scale, rotate, pan, zoom in and out of the canvas with simple finger gestures. Available on Bamboo, Intuos, and Cintiq touch-based tablets.

Product Description
Anime Studio is your complete animation program for creating 2D movies, cartoons, anime or cut out animations. Create your own desktop animated shorts in the style of SouthParkStudios.com and JibJab.com, or use it to produce animations for film, video or streaming over the web. Get started quickly with the Beginner's Mode. Create your own custom characters using the built-in Character Wizard and convert your existing paper drawings to ready-to-animate vector images with one click. Draw your own artwork using built-in brushes, import digital photos, add sound and video, and choose from pre-designed characters or create your own and make them talk using integrated lip-synching. The revolutionary bone rigging system makes animating fast and an efficient alternative to tedious frame-by-frame animation.

My Take on the Software
I ended up trying the Pro version of this before the Debut, and I should have done the opposite as this version was much easier to master than the Pro, though the Pro did have some more in-depth robust features within it.

I was quite impressed with the functionality of this version! I found the software to be easy to use and for someone with little to no experience with Anime the software was intuitive and you could easily start the process of designing some fun artwork in the stroke of a few keys.

What I loved most about this, was the character wizard that this has, as it makes the design process simple and flawless and in no time you will have created some great characters that you can use over and over again!

All-in-all this was amazing software that allows you to look and feel like a professional artist which is fun and exciting for someone who never thought he could be!

All opinions expressed in this review are my own and not influenced in any way by the company.  Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider. Please refer to this site's Disclaimer  for more information. I have been compensated or given a product free of charge, but that does not impact my views or opinions.

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