In my opinion Anime Studio Pro 9 isn’t really worth its high price tag and I found that I wasn’t very impressed by the tools they had to offer. Now that that is out of the way, I will tell the bad parts of the Anime Studio Pro 9 program.
After that I went on to using Windows Paint XP and the classic Windows movie maker, which was a lot of hard work because I had to draw each frame, character and background and manually put it together by copying and pasting then building it on the time line. So going into this I had that in mind because it was so easy animating and drawing content using Klick & Play.
When I was a kid I used a game making program called Klick & Play by Maxis, you could make games with it but you could also do animations. I wouldn’t consider myself a beginner animator, I have used other programs and I have done hand drawn and classic animation in the past. The other with the gun is a concept character I drew and animated using Unity. The below images are things I drew and animated using Windows Paint XP and Jasc’s Animation Shop program. If you are into making simple animations on the line of South Park or side scrolling stick figure drawings then this will be perfect for you. Anime Studio Pro 9 also has preset characters and resources you can use, or you can take the time to use the program to draw your own without having to use a third party drawing program. You can then export the file to create a movie to upload it to Youtube or save it to a DVD. You can adjust the animations using the timeline to speed up your animations or slow them down, change scenes, or import new images to appear, then play it back in real time to see how your animation looks. You can create multiple scenes, import images, and use other programs to create your animation masterpiece, such as importing image files from Photoshop.
The amount of time you put into your animations determines the overall quality of the animation. The end effect looks like something you would see in an Adobe Flash movie.
The Anime Studio Pro 9 also has an Onion skin feature so that you can see the different layers of your animation while putting it all together. You can then create key frames of simple movements- such as the arm being down by the side, then sticking out, then up by the character’s head, and the program will fill in all additional movements so that it creates a smooth transition. You can also create or paste backgrounds so that your characters move independently from the environment. The best thing of Anime Studio is its bone rigging system because you can attach body parts to the movable bone lines to manipulate your characters to your liking, so that each bone only moves that one body part so that you can get the effects you are looking for. For those of you wondering, you can buy Anime Studio Pro 9 for about $85 (From Amazon) through $90 USD, the newer updated versions going for around the $200 mark from the official website.
There are some good and bad things with this program, but first I will start with all of the pros and the good things it has to offer. If you are on the fence for rather you should purchase this program or not, read on and hopefully I can help you decide. If I ever et my hands on the newer version I will write a separate review for that and will compare the differences. The official Smith Micro website has a newer Anime Studio Pro 11 out with new enhanced features, but I have not used the newer versions so this review will be for Smith Micro’s Anime Studio Pro 9. Before we get started I want to point out that Anime Studio 9 is not the latest version.