Jim's Animation Page
First Posted March 23, 2011

    I recntly purchased a couple of animation programs for the PC.  Anime Studio 7 Debut, and Claymation Studio.  As of today, I have only "played" with these programs, getting familiar with what they do.  Here are my initial thoughts.

Claymation Studio

    This is, by far, probably the easiest program to use.  It is very simple.  You make figures out of plasticine clay, and using a camera, you shoot one frame at a time, moving the figures a little bit each time.  I used to do something similar wihen U was in high school using all sorts of objects to animate.  You can do the same with claymation studio.  It also has tools for modifying photos, etc.  You then arange all of the frames and then can  turn them into a movie.

    Now, I got the Claymation Studio Delux package, that comes with a camera.  On my Dell Dimension 9100 runing XP SP3, the camera causes problems on the USB bus.  If you have a nice camera with a USB port, use that and save about $15.

Anime Studio 7 Debut

    This program is a more advanced animation system.  You draw figures that you can then animate.  I have not explored all of the posibilities yet, but it is very simple to use, although, much more involved than Claymation Studio.  It does have the tools so you can create your characters and make them do things.  It looks very fun.

    The only problem I have experienced so far is that when I try to close the Library Content window, the program crashes.  So...I just don't close this window.

    Another problem I had is with the Tutorial.  When I got to the point of adding bones to a figure, I could not find the tools for doing this.  Turns out, I had the program in beginner mode.  By prutiting it in expret mode, things went a lot easier.  There is probably no reason to have a beginners mode, the expert mode does not seem to be any more difficult to understand.