Product Reviews

Toon Boom Studio is a sophisticated and quirky drawing application designed for creating 2D drawn animations, with Flash-style drawing tools, onion skin viewing options and frame-based timelines. It combines a wide range of traditional and digital animation techniques, and the latest version, Toon Boom Studio 4.5, packs in a range of significant enhancements that should excite animators.

One particularly attractive new feature is the ability to import video files and integrate drawn content with the real-life footage, or use this for hand-traced rotoscoping work. Whether

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you integrate video content with your work or use it as a drawing guide, this is a very important ability.

Another new feature is support for layered Photoshop files. You can build multi-layered graphics in Photoshop and import them into Toon Boom Studio, and your layers can be preserved intact. This is useful, although it isn't as complete as it might seem. The layers are turned into Elements (in Toon Boom parlance) with bitmap image content. Content drawn with Toon Boom's own tools is made with Flash shapes, so it can be reformed in vector-like ways. Imported image content can't be edited in the same way, but they can be rotated, scaled and built into the animation sequence independently.

All this comes along with its existing abilities such as pressure-sensitive brush tools, lip-synced motion, multiple exposure sheets, useful painting and fill tools, control over velocity, scale, and other parameters, multiple cameras, audio, visual transforms... the list goes on and on.

Toon Boom's new features are very welcome. It still has its quirks, and it still slows down a fair bit when dealing with larger imported images, but it's maturing well.