Toon Boom Animate 2 is the gold-standard tool for creating Flash animations. As there’s some confusion surrounding the word “Flash,” you should know that it’s both a file format (used to display animations—and other kinds of multimedia presentations—on the Web and other platforms) and also a program used to create those files. The full name of the Adobe Flash-file-creating program is Adobe Flash CS5. It creates Flash animations but you can create Flash animations with other programs, too.

While Adobe Flash CS5 gives you the basic tools you need to tween images, it lacks many tools pro animators have come to expect from higher-end animation apps. Toon Boom Animate 2 not only fills that gap, it also includes much-needed features like Xsheets, advanced rigging (with inverse kinematics), a rich set of drawing tools, TWAIN support for in-app scanning, advanced color palettes, and virtual cameras.

If you’ve already been using Toon Boom Animate, what you’ll enjoy most about this new version is its speed. The developers have made more than 100 optimizations, using multithreading, disk caching, and optimized OpenGL support. Animate 2 also includes goodies such blend modes, velocity controls, and, thankfully, the ability to auto-distribute individual parts of a drawing to multiple layers.

If you’re an ActionScript programmer, or if you’re creating simple animations, you should probably stick with Adobe products. But if you’re creating a movie for the Cartoon Network, you owe it to yourself to check out Toon Boom Animate 2.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Toon Boom Animation Inc.
Price: $699.99 (Upgrade: $299.99)
Web: www.toonboom.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Speed; ability to auto-distribute individual drawing parts
Not:

You can apply any of these effects whether you own them or not. If you don’t own the effects, you’ll be able to use them in a limited way (e.g., with a watermark). To purchase (or get full access, if it’s a free effect), just click the Register button in the Effect Controls panel. This will launch a desktop app that allows you to register and purchase plug-ins.

FxFactory also works in Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Final Cut Express. Once you register a plug-in, you can use it in those programs too, without having to reregister (or repurchase) anything.

FxFactory Pro 2, the big brother of FxFactory, isn’t free; it’s $399, but ships with 150 plug-ins. (Note: These plug-ins were not tested for this review.) This version also allows you to create your own plug-ins using Quartz Composer, a visual programming editor developed by Apple.

Note the word “Apple” at the end of the last paragraph. The FxFactory products are only available for the Mac. But if iTunes-like plug-in stores really are the wave of the future, we’ll soon be seeing FxFactory—or something like it—on all platforms.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Noise Industries, LLC
Web: www.noiseindustries.com
Price: Free (FxFactory Pro 2: $399)
Rating: 4
Hot: Convenient way to test plug-ins without buying them
Not: Mac only; clutters up your Effects menu

Holomatrix is an After Effects plug-in that does one thing well: It gives footage that produces ghost-like, scan line, holodeck, and “help me Obi-Wan Kenobi” looks. It’s an unusual plug-in because it’s not listed in the Effects menu. Instead, it’s applied by choosing Window>Holomatrix, which then applies a bunch of complex presets to the selected layer—presets that use many effects and expressions, and that involve multiple levels of precomposing.

As the presets use built-in effects, you could (in theory) do everything Holomatrix does, without buying the plug-in. Good luck! The developers have obviously spent hours figuring out the best way to create the holodeck look, and the process is instantaneous. Choose the plug-in from the menu and—wham-o—you’re done.

If you’re not happy with the default look, you can make infinite adjustments in the Effect Controls window or in the custom Holomatrix panel that appears after you apply the effect. You can choose from many presets (or save your adjustments as a new preset), turn on-and-off various aspects of the effect (glows, random flickers, etc.), and adjust the thickness and color of the scan lines.

As the result is an unusual mixture of expressions and built-in effects, there are some gotchas to be aware of when deleting the effect (because it’s not a single effect, you can’t just select it and delete it) and when using it in complex situations, such as 3D. Luckily, Holomatrix comes with a detailed manual and there are also some excellent tutorial videos on Red Giant’s website.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Red Giant Software LLC
Price: $99
Website: www.redgiantsoftware.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Infinite adjustments, speed, presets, detailed manual
Not:

When I need particles, I reach for Partigen 2. Though it only works inside Flash, I export its animations for After Effects and Premiere Pro projects. Why am I gaga over Partigen? Because it gives me total control over every facet of particle creation, emission, and lifespan. If I can’t produce the effect I want in the interface, I dig under the hood by writing code in ActionScript, the programming language of Flash.

Those working exclusively in ActionScript can use Partigen 2 for free. Noncoders must purchase the user interface (a Flash plug-in). It ships with more than a hundred presets (fire, water, explosions, bubbles, etc.), which you can modify as it suits your needs. You can dial in particles-per-second, direction, lifespan, velocity, acceleration, and friction. You can animate particle position, scale, alpha, and color.

Though Partigen comes with many particles (fire, water, smoke, etc.), I couldn’t find an easy way to use custom ones (e.g., company logos). You can do it with code, but I wish Partigen’s UI let me pick movie clips from the Library to use as particles.

Another limitation in the UI is that you can only control position in the x and y planes. So I should update my claim above to say that I reach for Partigen for 2D-particle effects. For those, Partigen gives me everything I need in its fun-to-use, simple interface, which allows me to save my effects as presets and share them with friends.

Partigen doesn’t come with a manual, but there’s a how-to video on Desuade’s website.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Desuade
Price: $147 (Upgrade: $67)
Web: www.desuade.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Easy; powerful; control via UI and code
Not: 2D only; availability of power features

After Effects has such a powerful built-in text engine, what more could an animator need? Noise Industries has answered that question by taking a close look at existing features and augmenting them with their Motype 1.2 plug-in.

I find myself using it most often for random characters; you know, that technobabble stuff clients always want scattered around the screen, making all compositions look like consoles from the Starship Enterprise. I can create this effect using the After Effects text engine alone, but Motype gives me many more options. For instance, I can specify a specific pool of random characters from which the randomizer can choose; limit the randomization to uppercase (or lowercase) only; or choose just letter, just number, or just symbols.

Motype allows me to quickly set up text fly-ons, fade-ups, descrambles, etc. without mucking about with keyframes. As text moves, it can leave behind an echoey trail or even spit out custom particles. The effect has built-in motion blur, 3D-camera movement, and interesting background patterns that can sit behind the text.

My one gripe about Motype is that it’s an island unto itself, rather than being fully integrated into the After Effects existing text engine. As such, although it has built-in 3D capabilities, it doesn’t interact with the native 3D engine in After Effects. Nor can you move its text along on After Effects paths. This means that when planning a text effect, you must decide if you’re going to achieve it with the After Effects engine or with Motype—it’s tough to combine the two.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Noise Industries, LLC
Price: $99
Web: www.noiseindustries.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Fills in gaps from After Effects text engine
Not: Not fully integrated with After Effects; Mac only

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder is my client who expects me to iron out every wrinkle and erase every blemish. Until I stumbled on Beauty Box, I resorted to laborious frame-by-frame adjustments or gross, unrealistic softening. Beauty Box, a plug-in for After Effects, has a built-in, face-recognition engine. Just park on a frame in which the actor is facing the camera, click the Analyze Frame button, and you’re done. Beauty Box automatically detects skin, smoothes it out in a realistic way, and it doesn’t touch anything in the frame that isn’t part of the actor’s face.

Okay, it’s not always that easy. You have to adjust the effect’s parameters as the lighting changes and the actor moves. But this plug-in’s automated features get you at least half way to the goal. Then you can keyframe subtle changes in skin color and smoothing, using masks to control which parts of the image are affected.

Amazing as this plug-in is, it’s really built for single-actor shots; multiple actors mean multiple skin tones, and Beauty Box can only deal with one at a time. To solve this, I duplicated the footage and corrected each actor on a separate layer, compositing the result.

The one other frustration is speed—or lack thereof. Beauty Box takes about 3 seconds to process each HD frame, so take that into account as you crawl toward your deadline. As slow as it is, it’s still a lot faster than frame-by-frame correction.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Digital Anarchy
Price: $199
Web: www.digitalanarchy.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Timesaver for skin correction; easy to use
Not: Only for single-actor shots; slow

Some designers have a background in 3D modeling. I don’t. Still, clients expect me to make their logos spin and dance in 3D space. As much as I’d love to learn how to use Maya or 3ds Max, I don’t have the time or resources to do so.

Thank goodness for Swift 3D 6. It’s a 3D application made specifically for Flash designers. It allows them to draw simple shapes, type text, or import AI/EPS files and extrude them. You can then color and shade the model and animate it using a Flash-like Timeline. Swift 3D ships with preset animations, such as spins and bounces, that you can apply via drag-and-drop. It also comes with a large styles library, so if you want your object to look like glass or chrome, you don’t have to create that look from scratch. You can render out your model in a variety of styles, including photorealism and various cartoonish looks.

Once you import your project into Flash, you see it as a series of layers on the Timeline. Each aspect of the 3D data (reflections, colors, shadows, etc.) is on its own layer, so you have independent control of all the parts.

Advanced users will enjoy Swift 3D’s ability to import industry-standard 3DS and DFX formats. Swift 3D also includes polygon tools for advanced modeling. Developers will enjoy the program’s ability to export models and Papervision3D scenes.

With Swift 3D, I’m able to tell clients, “Yes, I can!”—Marcus Geduld

Company: Electric Rain
Price: $129
Web: www.erain.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Huge time saver; bargain: 25 effects for $129
Not: Mac only; lack of built-in image ordering

The best tools are the least sexy, and CoreMelt ImageFlow FX is a perfect example. It’s not the sort of tool that will wow you when you see it demonstrated at a conference or user-group meeting, but it’s the tool that may save you hours of toil. That’s better than sexy; that’s money in the bank.

Put simply, ImageFlow FX is a Mac-only plug-in for After Effects, Motion, and Final Cut Pro that generates slide shows from still images. You apply it to a solid and then, in the Effect Controls panel, point it to a folder that contains images. ImageFlow FX displays each image, one by one, with cool transitions between images. If you’ve ever tried to do this by hand, you know how boring and time-consuming it can be.

ImageFlow FX will display the images or videos in the folder in filename order or in a random order. That’s probably good enough for most purposes, though I wish it would let me order the images any way I want. To get around this, I name my images image01.png, image02.png, image03.png, etc. in the order I want them to appear (ImageFlow FX works with most standard image and video types, not just PNGs).

New to version 2 is the ability to pull images from “image wells,” which are layers in your Composition. You can pull images from up to eight wells.

ImageFlow FX isn’t a single effect—it’s a suite of 25 effects, each one containing a different transition. Some of the transitions are simple, such as fade-ins and drop-downs; others are more complex, such as 3D zooms, carousels, and image walls. Each effect has a default behavior that you can easily customize, changing timings and x, y, and z positions.

The effects allow you to add custom masks and frames to images. ImageFlow ships with many standard frames, but you can add your own. You can choose to display each image just once, or you can loop the images so that after the last one displays, the slide show begins again with the first image. The effects also support blend modes, so as various transitions cause images to overlap, they can interact with each other in interesting ways. If your images aren’t all the same size, you can tell ImageFlow FX to leave them as is or scale them to fit so they’re all the same. I’ve gotten best results when my images are all the same size, so if I have images of different dimensions, I usually animate them in groups, giving each group its own instance of an ImageFlow FX effect.

I’ve also been experimenting with using ImageFlow FX to create quick, funky backgrounds. I fill several folders full of random images and then layer random, looping slide shows on top of each other, mixing them together with blend modes.

As is my usual custom, I initially tried out ImageFlow FX by downloading the free, 15-day trial version. I was pleased to discover that CoreMelt let me keep four of the 25 effects permanently, with no obligation to buy the full product. The four free effects are Carousel, Continuous Random Pan, Multi Pop Forward, and Filmstrip. But it was a no-brainer choosing to buy the suite. I knew my $129 would repay itself almost immediately, giving me more time to focus on really creative work rather than sequencing dozens of still images on a timeline.—Marcus Geduld

Company: CoreMelt Pty Ltd
Price: $129
Web: www.coremelt.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Huge time saver; bargain: 25 effects for $129
Not: Mac only; lack of built-in image ordering

Ask Web animators what application they use, and the majority will tell you it’s Adobe Flash. That’s too bad. Although Flash CS4 has made great strides by adding 3D and inverse kinematics (bones) to its toolset, it’s a limited animation program when compared to Toon Boom Animate.

Toon Boom Animate includes the following features that Flash lacks: lip-syncing, 3D multiplane cameras, cell swapping, multiple brush tools, and motion blur. Like Flash, Animate includes onion skinning, animateable effects, path editing, gradients, inverse kinematics, masks, reusable symbols, sound support, layers, vector shape tools, and multiple color palettes.

Animate’s palette support is much more complex and fully featured than that in Flash. For instance, each drawing tool in Animate can have its own color. In Flash, if you chose stroke and fill colors, all drawing tools will use those colors. Morphing in Animate is also much more feature-rich than it is in Flash (where it’s called Shape Tweening). Animate contains a suite of tools and controls to allow you to get exactly the morph you want, and it can import most standard formats, including MOV, SWF, PSD, AI, and PDF. It can export QuickTime movies, FLV, and SWF (Flash) files.

As a long-time Flash animator, I most enjoyed using Animate’s lip-synching tools, as this task has always been arduous in Flash. Animate lets you draw mouth shapes for each common sound. It then analyzes the audio and automatically maps mouth shapes to the soundtrack. You can override its analysis if necessary, manually choosing which mouth shape to use at a specific time.

Traditional animators will love the fact that Animate includes Xsheets (exposure sheets), which are spreadsheet-like charts used to plot out animations in a standard film and video workflow. Animate’s Xsheets are more than just charts; you can plot keyframes on them instead of on the Timeline if you prefer that workflow. I find it best to use both the Timeline and the Xsheet. The Xsheet gives you many more details about what’s going on in each frame; the Timeline gives you a quicker, more-compact overview.

A strong point for Flash is also one of its weak points: its small number of tools. The smaller the tool set, the easier the application is to learn. New users can be up and running with Flash within a few hours. On the other hand, Animate’s complexity means a steeper learning curve without the plethora of books, courses, and online training videos you can find for Flash. To help new users, Toon Boom has loaded their website with training videos and “getting started” documents.

Another strong point in Flash is ActionScript. Flash isn’t just an animation tool, it’s also a computer-programming platform. Toon Boom has wisely chosen to focus only on animation, so you can’t use Animate to code interactive movies or games, but Animate does include a scripting language that allows you to automate repetitive tasks in the application itself.

One thing missing from Animate is a Type tool. If I had to choose between animating text in Animate or Flash, I would choose Flash. Although Flash has a Type tool, its text-animation features are sorely lacking. I usually animate text in After Effects, which includes the most advanced text-animation tool I’ve found.

Available for both Mac and PC, Animate retails for $999.99. Compare that with Flash, which is few hundred dollars cheaper, retailing at $699. Those prices seem about right, given the animation features of the two applications.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Toon Boom Animation Inc.
Price: $999.99
Web: www.toonboom.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Full-featured; powerful tool for professional animators
Not: Pricey compared to Flash; no Type tool

1 CREATE A NEW SOUND FILE
Start by launching Soundbooth and click the red Open Record Dialog icon at the bottom of the interface. In the Record dialog, select your method of input from the Device drop-down menu at the top. Enter “Voiceover” for the File Name and then click the Browse button to choose a location for your file. Next, click the red Start Recording button and speak into the microphone. When finished recording, click the Close button in the Record dialog.

2 INSERT VOICEOVER INTO MULTITRACK
There are a couple of ways you can incorporate your voiceover recording into a multitrack project. You could choose File>Save As to save the voiceover file, and then start a new multitrack project by choosing File>New>Multitrack File. Then simply import your voiceover file into the new multitrack project. But instead, let’s click the Tracks button and chose Insert Waveform into New Multitrack File. In this example, the voiceover was a mono recording. Had it been stereo, we could have chosen Insert Channels into New Multitrack File, which would have copied each channel of the source onto a separate track in the multitrack project.

3 INSERT OTHER SOUND FILES
Now that your voiceover is on its own track, go ahead and import some other sound files. Click the Open Files icon (it looks like a folder) at the top of the Files panel and navigate to a folder where you have some saved audio files. Select several files and click Open. Soundbooth will switch away from the multitrack project (it assumes you want to solo edit the last individual file you opened), so to return to your multitrack project, double-click its name on the File panel.

4 ADD FORGOTTEN FILES
You can now drag files from the Files panel to the Editor. Each file will appear as its own track. At this point, if you realized you had forgotten to import a file, you can simply drag it from your operating system’s file browser into the Editor. If you want the file to be added to an existing track, just drop it on that track. If you want the file to appear on its own track, drop it on an empty area below the other tracks.

5 SEQUENCE FILES IN TIME
To sequence the sound tracks in time, simply click-and-drag the tracks left and right in the Editor. Check your work by pressing the Play button at the bottom of the interface and also by dragging the playhead left and right. Keep repositioning the files until you’re happy with the sound.

6 ADD FADES
When you click on a track in the Editor, you’ll have access to interactive controls that allow you to add fades, adjust volume, adjust panning, and edit in/out points. To add fades, click-and-drag the square control points in the upper-left and upper-right corners of the track in the Editor. Drag up or down to control the curve of the fade.

7 ADJUST VOLUME AND PANNING
You can also adjust volume and panning via the interactive controls. For example, to adjust panning, scrub the circular control on the right. (To scrub it, point to it with your mouse, hold down the mouse button, and drag left or right, as if you’re trying to drag the circle out of the Editor.) You can also click inside the numerical text fields to type volume or panning values.

8 EDIT IN AND OUT POINTS
To edit a file’s in point, move your mouse cursor to the left edge of the track until the cursor changes to a bracket-like symbol. Then hold down the mouse button and drag right to crop away the beginning of the file. Drag left to add back the content that you cropped. You can edit the out point by dragging inward and outward from the file’s right edge.

9 GET IN CLOSE
If you need to zoom in to make close edits to a file in just one of the tracks, double-click it in the Editor to open it in its own Editor panel. When you’re done working on it, click the Back button to return to the multitrack project.

10 SAVE YOUR PROJECT
When you’re satisfied with your multitrack project, choose File>Save. We saved our file as an MP3, but notice all the other options, including FLV | F4V for use in Flash projects.