Cartoon Doctor - www.drmussey.com

I am extremely impressed with the quality of documentation for Digital Pro. In general, the greatest flaw in animation programs, both 2D and 3D is usually with the documentation. Many years ago, I read an article about writing great animation software, particularly 3D software, and it stated the prevailing attitude of the time: The programmers spend many intensive hours writing high quality software. Once they finish and have it ready to release to market, somebody says, “Maybe we should put together a manual.” So, the crew breaks out a case of beer and scribbles together a manual the night before the software’s release. Anyone who used those early programs could easily believe this scenario. Toon Boom’s documentation, however, is extremely good. Their documentation has represented a major advantage for users. Studio’s documentation, in particular, has really excelled in the past few years. Solo’s documentation, however, often left out significant areas of explanation. To some extent, ...

My copy of Toon Boom’s Digital Pro, the high end animation software for individual users and small animation companies arrived yesterday. I am a very familiar and heavy user of Solo, the first version of the software, and was extremely anxious to start using the new program. The software installs fairly easily. There is an activation process and a dongle, which is expected for software of this caliber. Thankfully, the software can be installed on more than one machine and it does not tie itself to the machine’s hardware. The only catch: To run a copy of the software, you need to move the dongle to the machine in use. Compared to software like Adobe Premiere, this is much more user friendly and allows you to move from machine to machine in your setup without being treated like a software pirate. For me, this allows me to animate on my Tablet PC, but compile and do fancy effects, color correction, etc. on my big desktop without going blind using the small screen on my portable PC. ...

I’m working on a new animation that will be a bit longer than my usual 30-second PSA. This one is about global warming and I’m working on a real tight deadline. I’m using Solo, exclusively. This time, I’m taking all the short-cuts typical of limited TV animation and using Solo’s template feature to its maximum. This is new for me. I’m hoping it looks okay. I will not be posting “in progress” animations because of the template nature. I am using only my own templates, but I have never reused animation like this to such an extent. We’ll see.