<![CDATA[Animation Animation Last news (Animation > Design & Photography > Mac) (Animation > Design & Photography > Mac): Softonic]]> <![CDATA[Animation Animation Last news (Animation > Design & Photography > Mac) (Animation > Design & Photography > Mac): Softonic]]> <![CDATA[Anime Studio Debut 7.0-Excellent animation and cartoon creation suite]]> If you love drawing animations or have always dreamed of creating your own cartoons, then you can do so easily with Anime Studio Debut.

Anime Studio Debut is a powerful animation tool for creating and editing animations on your Mac and then animating them frame by frame. Anime Studio Debut allows you to start from scratch with your own designs or it has lots of samples and templates that add a real touch of professionalism to your creations.

You don't even have to create your own characters as Anime Studio Debut features ready-to-use cartoon characters, props, video, and even sounds so you can start creating your own animations right away. Even though it may seem a little overwhelming at first, there are many easy to follow tutorials and sample files about how to get going.

Sharing your masterpieces is also easy - Anime Studio Debut can export your work directly to Flash video and also YouTube and Facebook to impress your friends with. It doesn't export to other media formats though and it is limited to 2D animation.

Most recently, Anime Studio has been updated to allow audio recordings, manipulation of 3D shapes and other advanced tools that make movements incredibly realistic.

Anime Studio Debut will make even the most novice cartoonist or animator produce professional results.

Download Anime Studio Debut 7.0 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Pencil 0.4.4b-Create animated digital comics]]> I've always been fascinated with animation and these days there are loads of professional software tools around that allow you to become a cartoonist yourself.

Pencil tool is a little different from the likes of Flash or Director in two ways: a) it is based around traditional hand-drawn animation techniques, and b) it's free.
At the center of the application is a timeline, which allows you to add four types of layers: bitmap image, vector image, sound, and camera. The animation basically works by setting keyframes one each layer and arranging the different layers on top of each other.

You start by sketching out your characters in bitmap format using the pencil tool, before adding a vector layer and inking it out with the pen tool and fill tool.
The principle is very simple and the interface is much clearer than that of Flash or a similar high-end animation tool. What I liked about Pencil is that all the tools and options are on display from the start and nothing is hidden, plus you can detach or remove palettes to make things easier on yourself.

The problem with Pencil is that it's very difficult to produce good quality drawings unless you have a graphics tablet - most mouses simply aren't conducive to precise sketching.
What's more, there aren't any predefined shapes, objects or templates included that might help you get started.
So, while this might be a good way to learn the basic principles of cartoon animation, it's difficult to create anything truly impressive unless you've lots of patience.

Download Pencil 0.4.4b in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[SWF & FLV Player 3.8.17.6225-SWF & FLV Player packed with interesting controls]]> Download SWF & FLV Player 3.8.17.6225 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Morph Age 4.1.3-Morph and warp animations and movies]]> Download Morph Age 4.1.3 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[I Can Animate 1.5.4-Create cool animated movies]]> Download I Can Animate 1.5.4 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[CrazyTalk 7.0-Facial animation and lip-sync software]]> CrazyTalk for Mac is a useful tool that lets you create animation and add audio to facial images.

Overview

Digital animation technology has improved so much that it’s now possible to animate your own talking heads from your home PC. CrazyTalk promises to give you all the tools you need to import images and photographs before quickly applying mouth, head and eye movement to create realistic looking avatars and fun animations.

At first users might be a little skeptical about the value of CrazyTalk, Give it a try though and you'll be pleasantly surprised by the power of the utility. Granted, most peoples' initial efforts with the program will likely be limited to taking pictures of friends and adding famous song or movie audio clips to them just for kicks. These first experiments in CrazyTalk will be a little clunky and look far from realistic when you rely on the automatic lip-syncing functionality.

Features

Once you delve deeper into CrazyTalk's settings though, you'll start to realize that you can actually produce some impressive animations.

With enough tinkering you can customize everything in CrazyTalk, from the teeth in the character’s mouth to their facial movements and their range of movement. Best of all is the built-in timeline, which gives you complete control of the animation and sound, much as you would do in Flash, or a video-editing suite.

CrazyTalk offers alpha channel support, making it ideal for producing talking images to welcome visitors to your web site or in presentations. The simple-to-use export facilities also allow you to save to a range of formats as a media file, email attachment or a personalized greeting.

There are a few flaws with CrazyTalk that are a little frustrating though. The auto lip sync feature isn't all that impressive or accurate, for one, and there's no support for MP3 format audio. There also aren't all that many preset templates to work from, which might be bothersome to some users. In addition, on Mac there are too many updates and when new updates are applied, you lose any bonus content you may have added.

CrazyTalk requires some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it you'll be able to create unique facial animations.

Download CrazyTalk 7.0 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Toon Boom Studio 6.0-Animation software studio for professionals]]> When it comes to professional animation, there can be few packages more complete than Toon Boom Studio.

Toon Boom Studio enables professional animators to create rich, eye-catching animations for video, websites, television, film, games, mobile devices, e-learning applications, and much more.

It should be clear from the start that this is strictly a professional application, although the developer does offer a more basic version of Toon Boom Studio for beginners.

Toon Boom Studio allows you to import media such as templates, movies and photos as long as they are in SWF, AI, PSD, JPEG, TGA and GIF format.

The aim of the studio is to make animation on your Mac as natural as drawing with pen and paper. You can bring life to your animations with sound (in WAV, AIFF, MP3 format) and to make things look more realistic, there's a lip sync analyzer to make sure your characters lip-sync in time.

You can zoom in and out of animations, create 3D spaces and scale and rotate your creations until they're exactly right. Export formats are fairly flexible too including Flash (SWF), QuickTime, DV Stream and AVI.

The other big advantage that Toon Boom Studio offers is that you don't need to learn how to animate in Flash to use it.

Toon Boom Studio is a powerful and flexible professional animation packages that should make your creations come to life.

Download Toon Boom Studio 6.0 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[GiftedMotion 1.18-Create your own animated GIFs]]> Ever wanted to create your own animate GIFs but don't know where to start? GiftedMotion is a Java-based package which is supposed to make the process easy.

Animated GIFs are great to use as an avatar on a forum, create moving banners, or to add a bit of spice to your website. The interface of GiftedMotion is simple enough - you simply browse to the images you want to create the animated GIF with and then order them in the sequence that you want to animate. Press 'Play' to animate them, then hit 'Record'.

The problem with GiftedMotion, as with many Java-based apps, is the amount of time it takes the application to respond to commands. There is an annoying delay between browsing to images and actually seeing them appear in GiftedMotion. The same goes for re-ordering your images and generally any kind of operation within the program feels like wading through syrup.

The Help section only reveals a Java pop-up, which gives you a web address where you can find the handbook. However, you have to enter this manually into your URL bar as you can't copy it. The manual is at least very clear and well annotated although it still doesn't change the fact that GiftedMotion is very slow.

GiftedMotion will eventually help you create your animated GIF although getting there is a slower and more painful process than it should be.

Download GiftedMotion 1.18 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[iSwiff 1.5-Play Flash games offline]]> Flash games are not always the best in terms of graphics but they're fun, fast and importantly, usually completely free.

The downside is that you always need a web browser and a connection to the internet to play them. Not so with iSwiff however. iSwiff allows you to play Flash games, animations and movies without your web browser or even a connection to the internet. Of course, you need to be able to download some Flash games but once you've done so, you can play them to your heart's content offline, within iSwiff. You can find plenty of games on the developer's website plus a search for "Flash games" or ".SWF files" in Google returns thousands of results.

You can play either in single screen or full screen mode and not have to worry about toolbars and ads getting in the way of your gaming experience. iSwiff works with any .SWF file and uses Adobes's Flash web plugin for playing movies. To open a .SWF file, simply drag it into the iSwiff icon or use the file menu in the top left of your menu bar. In the "Window" menu, you can switch to full-screen mode or simply drag the window to the size you require. You can use Cmd-F to exit full screen mode or just move your mouse to the top of the screen where the menu will appear.

To exit "full screen" move the mouse to the top of your screen and the menu will reappear. Or hit cmd-F.
You can also just hit cmd-Q to quit iSwiff. Perhaps the only downside of iSwiff is that the developers warn it may not work very well with .SWF files that use newer Flash innovations.

It would have been nice to have had a few auto-links to Flash games built into iSwiff but apart from that, there's no faulting it in a great offline Flash gaming environment.

Download iSwiff 1.5 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Norrkross MorphX 2.9.5-Have fun morphing images]]> Want to have a bit of fun with your pictures? How about you play around with morphing? Norkross MorphX is a good application to play around with this effect.

The application works both with images and movies and is really easy to use. You literally just drag and drop the two elements, drag lines in each photo to relate similar areas and let the application do the hard work.

Norkross MorphX works fairly quickly and lets you save a still image of the morph or even better the full movie in Quicktime.

Overall Norkross MorphX makes really great transitions and is really fun to work with.

We did however notice some issues with antialiasing. On the whole though, Norkross MorphX is easy to use and works really well.

Norkross MorphX is easy to use and makes great morphs really quickly.

Download Norrkross MorphX 2.9.5 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[The Road Trip Effect 2.7 Pro-Create animated itineraries]]> Download The Road Trip Effect 2.7 Pro in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Belle Nuit Subtitler 1.7.6-Prepare subtitles for your digital films]]>

Download Belle Nuit Subtitler 1.7.6 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Photo to Movie 5.2.0-Make stunning DVD slide shows]]> Download Photo to Movie 5.2.0 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Morph Age Pro 4.1.2-Professional Video Morphing Tool]]> Download Morph Age Pro 4.1.2 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Toon Boom Digital Pro Personal Learning Edition 1.0-High performance animation software]]> Professional animators have been anxiously waiting for Toon Boom Digital Pro. The finally released animation suite features an intuitive 3D space, which lets you easily add and move elements. It also streamlines your workflow considerably. You can quickly jump from and to steps like editing to rendering. We were impressed by the asset library and the 50+ compositing effects available . Advanced tools like multiple palette management, speed handling or inverse kinematics will cater to pro users. Toon Boom Digital Pro is also highly accessible to beginners thanks to 4 hours of video, tips and in line documentation.

The only real drawback to Toon Boom Digital Pro is probably the price. At $3000, it's quite an investment to make, and you have to make sure you'll make good use of the application. We strongly suggest testing out the trial before dishing out on Toon Boom Digital Pro.

Download Toon Boom Digital Pro Personal Learning Edition 1.0 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Isadora 1.1.1-Transform your digital media with this interactive editing app]]> Download Isadora 1.1.1 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Movie Whirl 1.0-Rotate a Quicktime movie]]> Download Movie Whirl 1.0 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Magpie Pro 2.2.5-Professional lip syncing and timing tool for animators]]> Magpie Pro is a highly specialized tool that allows animators to lip sync their creations to create truly professional results.

Magpie Pro can be used to alter frame rates and is integrated with Photoshop so you can build animations and lip sync as you go along.

You can preview work at any point, add layers and there's even a 'recognize' feature that tries to automatically match up voices with your animations. However, Magpie Pro is a highly technical application that is strictly for professionals - those new to animation or lip syncing should look elsewhere.

Magpie Pro is an ideal tool for any professional animator that wants to lip sync their animations.

Download Magpie Pro 2.2.5 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[MagicScroll 5.1.3-Prompting at a professional level]]> Download MagicScroll 5.1.3 in Softonic

]]> <![CDATA[Toki LineTest 4.5.4-Professional transition test software for animators]]> Toki LineTest is a pencil test software for cartoonists and animators, professionals animators, students or simply amateurs wanting to improve their animation skills.

Toki LineTest allows animators to create a better flow between their animations so that they run more smoothly and realistically. In addition, Toki LineTest can digitize images taken with a video camera (DV camera, webcam etc) or imported from a scanner, digital camera or drawing software. It can also help you record a soundtrack and synchronize it with your animation.

According to the developers, Toki LineTest has been used by animators as grand as Walt Disney indicating that this is a pretty sophisticated piece of animation software and it does take some working out. However, once you've mastered the menus, it allows you to import and export images, audio and video (but only in QuickTime format) which makes editing it together at a later stage in a third party app much easier.

Although it includes beginners in it's product description, Toki LineTest is quite a sophisticated animation package that will suit professionals and budding amateurs alike make smoother transitions.

Download Toki LineTest 4.5.4 in Softonic

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