Toon Boom’s Toon Boom Studio 4

The hands-down winner when looking for a Flash alternative

This is my review of Toon Boom Studio 4. Animation on the web is becoming more and more popular, but a lot of people who use Flash end up looking for something a bit more powerful to help bridge the gap between “web animation” and “professional animation.” Flash is great and has a lot of uses, but at the end of the day most animations created in Flash still end up looking like “Flash animations.”

Enter Toon Boom Studio 4, the latest consumer animation product from the makers of one of the most complete animation packages available to animation professionals. Toon Boom Studio 4 goes leaps and bounds beyond what is capable with Flash, and allows saving in both Flash and Apple Quicktime formats so that home animators can experience the best of both worlds.

Toon Boom Studio 4 can take a little bit of time to figure out, especially if you’re used to animating in Flash, but that’s largely because it’s a more powerful program with a lot more features. Instead of just doing your animation on the Stage and setting keyframes to mark the differences, you can actually work with different pieces that are grouped together and then arrange everything in the Scene Planner. This lets you control specific camera angles (and use multiple cameras), add props, and do so many things that require a lot more work to fit into the timeline in Flash.

There are also a number of downloadable elements available from the company’s website that you can incorporate into your animations, and an “onion skin” mode that lets you view ghosted images of previous frames so that you can make sure that everything is just the way that you want it before moving on to the next frame in your animation.

Even more impressive to me was the lip sync feature that they’ve included in the software. Getting speech to look right in Flash can be a pain, but with Toon Boom Studio 4 it’s relatively easy… the software will run through the audio and provide guides for how you should draw mouths on your characters to help you get it right the first time. This can save hours of reworks trying to get characters to look like they’re actually saying what the audio track is putting out, and should be a standard feature in any animation program that is put on the market.

If you get lost while working with Toon Boom Studio, the help section is actually helpful and will put a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Detailed explanations of pretty much everything that you might want to do in Toon Boom Studio 4 guide you to make sure that you’re able to do exactly what it is that you’re trying to do.

And once you get used to the program and it’s features you’ll likely be coming to use the help features less and less, because after you start using it much of the software works just as you would expect it to. There’s a bit of an adjustment period if moving to Toon Boom Studio from Flash, but once that’s over you’ll find it to be much more intuitive than most animation software out there.

Toon Boom Studio 4 isn’t cheap, but the price is worth it if you’re looking for a great piece of animation software. It can really help take your work to the next level.

Review by Catherine Barker