AAUG Reviews

by Zachary Zaletel, AAUG Member

Have you ever flipped through the television dial on a Saturday morning and run across one of the ubiquitous animated shows and wonder how hard that would be to do? I have, but only because I have friends who can draw much better than I can and left me feeling that my artistic endeavors were somehow lacking. In the many years that have since passed, I haven’t forgotten my curiosity. While talking to a friend the topic came up and I decided to see what all it takes.

Crack open the Anime Studio and you’re presented with a splash screen offering tutorials, content to purchase, and/or going straight into the program. I cracked into the tutorial and started walking through the basics, as my initial efforts without reading even the tutorial were going nowhere fast. The tutorial does a good job of giving an overview of the plethora of drawing, character, layer and camera tools presented to the user. Within a few minutes, I had the very basics down and started to play with my own creations. Would I call what I made high quality – no, but that’s the fault of the user and not the program. Needless to say, if you can imagine it, with a bit of effort, you can make it happen in Anime Studio.

More delving into the included documentation presented a wealth of tutorials that will walk you more fully through all of the features included with the program. The manual is very thorough, though if I were to have any gripes, they would be that: 1) it hasn’t fully be ‘translated’ from windows, with numerous references to ALT + this or that key, and 2) the discussion of the program interface is relegated to the back of the manual following the tutorials. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s the kind of stuff that you start with.

Additional tutorial content is available online, though it appears to be mainly sourced from users. Installation was a breeze, at least once the download was completed, which on my slowish DSL connection took, ahem, a while. The program is affordable at $50 – a pro version with greater capabilities (1080p HD output, etc) is available for $200. The program is available as a time-limited demo for you to try out as well.

I know I’m only very lightly tapping the potential contained in Anime Studio 6 at this point – it will take some time for me to get to a level anywhere near what I’m comfortable with calling myself capable with it, much less ‘proficient’ at it. That said, I’ve enjoyed exploring and using it, and I look forward to getting to the point where I can show off to my friends. If you’re seriously looking to delve into animation on your Mac, I recommend giving Anime Studio a look – I think you’ll enjoy it.

Conflict of interest disclosure: Smith Micro Software provided a free copy of Anime Studio 6 to me for the purposes of this review.