Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

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Thingy
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Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Thingy »

Hello,

As a relative new comer to Animation and Anime Studio Pro, I thought you'd be interested in what I've thought.

I've been using it now for a week or two and think its really good - it allows you to do all sorts of things that I hadn't even thought of before buying the program and its easy to get some really good looking scenes done in a short amount of time. I do notice however that sometimes it seems a bit "clunky" - especially the time line and having lots going on all at once. You end up with a sea of blobs allover the place and sometimes its very difficult\impossible to know whats affecting your animation and why. You can also get something to look brilliant and then change something and all of a sudden it mucks up what you've just done. Unlike Powerpoint that I was using, I've already learnt that you have to chop films up into scenes and edit them into a film in a separate editor, otherwise you'd drown in a sea of blobs.

Being a programmer I know how difficult a lot of this stuff is - GUI design is horrendously difficult and they have generally done a really good job. Its difficult to know how to represent what it represents in any other way. In otherwords, I think its "the nature of the beast" that whichever solution you go for, it will always be a bit overly "blobby".

This concludes my rambling thoughts.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Greenlaw »

Wecome aboard! :)

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'blobby' but I can tell you that it's common practice to break down your show into individual scenes and assemble them in another program for final output. And I'm talking about small personal or big studio productions.

Trying to do all your editing within a single ASP scene file, while possible, it not a very practical way to work.

A typical production workflow would be to first create a storyboard, and then create an animatic from the storyboard by cutting the still frames to the audio track in an editorial program (like Vegas, Premiere, etc.) The animatic may then be used as as a timing reference for the animation in ASP. Some users may even go as far as importing the individual animatic scene footage to ASP as backdrops with audio, and animatic on top of it. I'll do this when the exact audio timing or visual positioning is critical.

After completing each scene in ASP, you may then export the rendered scene to an image sequence or video clip, which you can overcut to the animatic in the editor. (Actually, after ASP, I typically do a bit of work to the footage in a compositing program for additional animation, processing and fx, but that's not absolutely necessary.) When you've replaced all the original animatic footage with animated clips, you're done!

Hope this helps.

G.
obtusity
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by obtusity »

Don't forget you can also view the timeline in Motion Graph mode as well (affected by what you have selected), might sometimes be clearer about what is happening than the keyframes (particularly for a programmer, perhaps?) e.g. graphs of a selected bone's rotation and translation. However, you may constantly be playing with zoom levels (use the mouse wheel).
Thingy
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Thingy »

Thank you. Yes thats very interesting - not heard of animatics before. I googled Animatics and found lots of information about them. I found something that mentioned they're for "pre-visualising" how the end story will look and I don't know if its just me but when I get an idea, I actually visually see the majority of the film in my imagination in total technical colour and I know how I want it to look and sound - there'll be other smaller more fluid type bits - little detail type things as I go along.

I dunno if this is relevant but when I got diagnosed as having reasonably severe dyslexia\dyspraxia when I was 35, they explained that I have a "highly enhanced" audio-visual, lateral thinking, big picture based type brain to counteract the difficulties. What concerns me is that if I was to try and plan out everything in an animatic and then do it "for real"... i'd get bored, fed up and lose interest as my slowness from the difficulties would mean that each film would take ages to make by which time ASP version 3001 would have been released.

I guess it proves the old wise words of "There are many ways to fling a cat"
<please dont fling a cat, they dont like it much>
Thingy
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Thingy »

I will take a gander at the Motion Graph - been wondering what it was used for
Thingy
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Thingy »

First thoughts are that Motion Graph looks like a map of the London Underground
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Greenlaw
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Greenlaw »

Sure, just letting you know what the most commonly used approach is for animated film production.

In my case, if I don't have a clear plan from the beginning, whether I'm working for myself or as part of a crew, the project may never actually get done. Without a plan (i.e., the animatic), too much time may get wasted in 'exploration'.

I've been on a couple of jobs where there wasn't a complete storyboard or animatic signed off by the client, and those tended to become the most expensive and least cohesive productions because the client couldn't decide what they really wanted. In the end, these jobs usually get done simply because time and money run out.

IMO, it's better to get the concepts and scenes firmly established in the beginning so that the production can be executed quickly and predictably. Then I can start thinking about my next project before getting bored, losing sleep or, even worse, bleeding money. :)

But, yes, you're correct--there are many ways to plan and execute an animated film, and some methods may not be the best for everybody.

G.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Tue Feb 23, 2016 10:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thingy
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by Thingy »

Thank you for your help and advice... I had a look at the Greenlaw demo reel and think you do fantastic work... far more impressive than what I could ever do... and I think thats an important difference - "Context". I'm doing it by myself and with the small things I do, it doesn't really matter if I make a right pigs ear of it as the worst that can happen is someone clicks on a youtube thumbs down or says that its pants. I know from my programming days that when working in teams on big\costly\time consuming projects you need to make sure that everybody knows what they're doing and how it will "look" , so planning it all out with who does what etc is very important.
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slowtiger
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Re: Thoughts on Anime Studio Pro 11

Post by slowtiger »

I think planning helps in any case. I'm wired similar to you, I see the complete result in my mind before I draw the first line. With my last 4 minute film, I had a sudden "epiphany" and could write down the complete voice-over in 30 min, then do the storyboard on 2 sheets of paper, and the final film is 90% like the storybard, and 99% like that text.

However, it rarely works like this. Usually I only have part of a film, but have to start anyway. So I do scribbles and storyboards and change stuff a lot before I animate. During animation I also will change scenes, mostly by deleting them.
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