Anime Studio Debut 7

Animation & Cartoons

Buy From Amazon

Features

  • Anime Studio Debut 7 offers complete animation for digital artists--perfect for first-time animators, hobbyists, and digital enthusiasts
  • Create your own art using intuitive vector-based draw, paint, and fill tools. or easily import artwork from popular graphics programs and use pre-built content to get started fast
  • Point-and-click to attach bones to your characters for easy manipulation and reduce production time over traditional frame-by-frame animation
  • Record your own sound clips inside Anime Studio with integrated Audio Recording and make your characters talk with built-in Lip Syncing
  • Export to the most popular web and video formats, or upload and share on YouTube or Facebook directly from within Anime Studio

User Reviews

I'm an artist whose primary medium has always been pen & ink and watercolor. I've never done any kind of animation (unless turning the pages of a paperback copy of Shane in 7th grade into a flip book counts), and never used animation software before getting Anime Studio Debut 7. The marketing for this software gave me the impression that learning to use it would be a lot easier than has been the case for me. Judging from some of the reviews I've read, I'm not the only person to have gotten such an impression. (Publishers of commercial software obviously want to sell it, and giving potential buyers the impression that the software is anything but super easy to use would not help sales.)

I think it is excellent software for someone who wants to be able to create simple 2D animated cartoons. But I would not recommend it to anyone who isn't prepared for what I would say is a fairly steep learning curve, or to anyone who is looking for animation software that will enable them to turn out gratifying results rapidly and with minimal effort. There's a lot to learn for someone who has never worked with animation software before. It's true that one can create a simplistic animation in minutes in Anime Studio Debut 7's beginner mode. But that novelty wears off fast. To really get into learning the potential of this software, one must watch tutorials, practice techniques explained in tutorials and in the PDF manual that comes with the software, familiarize oneself with terminology with which one may be unfamiliar (as I was), and learn step by step through trial and error.

My background as an artist and illustrator who's always worked with non-digital media has not helped me in the least where learning how to use the many tools in Anime Studio Deput is concerned. For me, it's a whole new ball game. Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's frustrating. It's the kind of software that one must really work at learning before working with it can become play.

In addition to the tutorials and the PDF manual that come with the software, the publisher's (Smith Micro) website has a number of tutorials as well as links to tutorials. There are a number of tutorials on YouTube, including some for ASD6 which remain applicable to ASD7. Some tutorials are better than others. I find the beginner tutorials at the Smith Micro site helpful. The voice-over instructions are by a pleasant-voiced young-sounding man who instructs at a pace I can follow. I unfortunately don't find Smith Micro's feature videos for ASD7 helpful at all. Instead of narration, each video is accompanied by the exact same muzaky sounding tune, while the instructional events are rushed through at a pace I cannot follow. But I have found helpful tutorials on YouTube.

There are a number of helpful professional reviews of this software out there, most of them quite positive and IMO with good reason, and I recommend that anyone contemplating purchasing this software read a few of them to help with their decision making process. You can also check out the tutorials at the Smith Micro site and elsewhere. -- Excellent 2D animation software with a fairly steep learning curve
I haven't used an animation program before so I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this one was to use. I do have experience with digital art programs (Photoshop and Painter) and other programs with timelines so that knowledge definitely helped me with this program.

The introduction video provided was informative and it covered the basics of using the simpler tools as well as an introduction to some of the advanced features. It was enough for me to understand what to do. The narration of the video was a bit fast but for the most part I could follow what the narrator was saying and I knew I could go back to the video anytime..

After watching the video it took me about 15 minutes to create a simple animation. I want to stress that it was simple. It included an image I had drawn earlier in Photoshop and two new objects that moved around the image.

I was happy to find out that the vector tools included a pencil tool which makes it possible to draw a shape directly as you want it. Most vector tools involve drawing lines and then manipulating them into the shape you want--or drawing basic shapes (circles, rectangles) and then adding points so that you can alter or distort their shape into what you want.

My next endeavor was to draw a person using the pencil tool and then add "bones" to the drawing so I could animate it. While the introductory video did cover the basics of this--I couldn't remember all the steps and therefore went to the Help menu which includes a 278 page manual written in easy to follow directions. I followed the tutorial in the manual and after a few minutes understood the steps.

Adding and animating bones is basically a pretty straight forward process--but the recommendation is to draw the body parts separate (arms, feet, head, torso, et.c) and then add bones to each of the separate pieces before attaching the body parts together. I'm sure this will produce the best animation--but I would rather just draw the body as one complete object to begin with.

The ability to add and record sound, and even to sync it with various pre-existing mouths is nice. The program definitely includes a lot of advanced features for a relatively low price.

Overall, I was impressed with the program. While many of its basic features are things that children ages 9 - 12 could do, many of the advanced features require a higher level of dedication to learn and use.

And lastly, knowing how to animate is one thing--knowing how to create an interesting animation is something else. While this program will help you with the first . . . you are on your own for the latter. -- Good Program
Directions not good for ten year old. Was looking for program for my grandson to learn how to make his own comics and draw the characters. He did very well with the program "Comic Life" but wanted to learn how to draw his own characters right on the computer instead of drawing them and then scaning them into the computer. -- Anime
This is really fun! I had hoped that I could use this software instantly, but one needs to devote a little bit of time to learn how to use it properly. I'm just getting started with it, but I can see that it will allow me to use my creativity (hah!). Since I don't mind criticism, as soon as I do an animation that I like, I'm going to put it on facebook and maybe even YouTube. Yes, Anime Studio lets you export the videos. This should keep me occupied for a long time as I explore all the things that I can do with Anime Studio. -- Simply Fun!
I've spent several hours with this software now and I can declare it complete, well-designed, largely intuitive, and "user-friendly." The good said about Anime Studio 7 is not hype; it's an excellent training ground and laboratory for learning about and producing animation. What perhaps does not get quite the attention that it should is that for those of us not bringing prior talent in visual arts (drawing preferrably, but at minimum a sense of visual style and attention to movement and so forth), Anime Studio can become a frustrating exercise in disappointment. I will never be more than a perhaps-adequate animator, and the most clever software in the world--which on a widely available basis Anime Studio might well be--is going to get me hired at Pixar.

I say that by way of encouraging you to manage expectations. If what you are looking for is to have fun, learn the basics of an interesting new skill, and express yourself, then clearly this is a tool of enormous praciticality for you. And if you are already an accomplished anime artist then Anime Studio 7 will give you the tools to bring your art to life (although being an excellent drawer and an excellent animator are not NECESSARILY synonomous). But if you think you're going to be able to load this software and within a few hours, a few days--even a few weeks or months--create the next Toy Story or South Park or, hell...Beavis and Butthead...you might find yourself becoming unhappy. -- Requires dedication to get the most, but easy to do basics.

Computer Hardware | Software | Accessories Tags: • • • •