The Apps I Use

People often ask me what apps I use to animate. I end up explaining what I use and how I use them. Then I started thinking, man, I’ve spent quite a bit of time finding all these other great apps and once I learn to use them for what they’ve been designed for, it makes my life a lot easier. I thought ‘I should do a post about them’. So, here it is.

(I use Mac, so some of these may only be available for Mac. Nobody paid me to mention their app.)

ProfitTrain

I dig this app for making invoices. It has other tools that I don’t use, but I dig how it makes invoices look kiff, it auto-numbers them, saves them out as a PDF, easy to make quotes, and I just dig it lank. Cost me about R300 or so. One of the best finds I’ve had.

Notability

Rad little app. Also, paid. But for making quick notes on projects, saving PDFs for quick access, quick doodles, shopping lists, sudden inspirational ideas while you’re waiting in the line at the shops, this app is great. Available for Mac, iPad and iPhone and syncs across devices which is KIFF. When I go on a trip I save my plane flights, itinerary, any supporting docs etc… to it so I have quick access to those things.

Photoshop CS6

I use dis a lot with a Wacom Cintiq 12″ for a lot of things. It’s probably the program I spend the most time in for drawing.

Premiere Pro CS6

Great editing app. I got the CS6 master suite collection at a good price. I actually got the educational discount while I was signed up for a photography course online and checked on the Adobe forums if I quit the course whether I’d still be able to use the educational discount for commercial work, and it all checked out. So, all above board. I don’t think you can do that now with CC all being online, but – maybe? Anyways, Premiere Pro has a quick engine, I only recently learned what a lot of the tools do which save me so much time, ya. I dig it. I edit animatics with Premiere Pro, I combine rendered out scenes into one final animation timeline, I add final audio to animation before I export the final file, I do colour-correction with RGB curves on rendered-out-scenes from other apps, and generally it’s the last program I use in the chain before a final render of a project.

Anime Studio Pro

I use for cut-out animation. Frame by frame not so great, but it has a really snappy engine and great keyframe animation tools and a friendly GUI. I used this for nearly all my animated Goldfish music videos, but I’ve moved onto Toon Boom now as I’m doing more hand-drawn frame-by-frame stuff.

Toon Boom Animate 2

I bought this a while ago and it used to frustrate the HECK out of me with it’s seemingly backward sensibilities. Now I’ve figured out Toon Boom’s idiosyncrasies better and I’m using it more like ‘how they’d like me to use it’ instead of how I’m sued to working with Photoshop and Anime Studio Pro, and it works pretty well. I believe the later versions of Toon Boom have ironed out some of the bugs, but, I’m ok using this version for now. Some of the tools are super, like ‘lightbox’ and ‘drawing view’ for actual animation and onion-skinning, and ‘black light’ (or whatever it’s called) for finding missed gaps when adding colour to frames. I still think the GUI is a little Windows 3.1-like.

Toon Boom Storyboard Pro 1.5

It’s an old version of the software, and it has a ton of weird bugs, but for quickly getting a storyboard / animatic up and running I use this to kick things off. Afterwards I bring things into Adobe Premiere when I start adding audio (I don’t dig how Storyboard Pro deals with audio, later versions may be better) but I find this great to get a rough idea of how things are shaping up.

Ableton Live 9.0

I use Ableton for audio production. I’ve learned how to make songs in it, and I finally bit the bullet and bought the Suite version. As such use it for editing audio when I need to – chopping things up to make new streams of audio for Premiere, I record voice into it and add compression and can EQ and other stuff in Ableton – works well for me. Feels like a very competent engine, has taken me a while to warm up to it and get the hang of it.

MPEG Streamclip 1.9.3b

What a great free piece of software. This app basically takes in video in almost any format, and spits it out in other formats. I use it mostly for taking big video files too large to email, and I have a preset that I use to make small H.264 web preview videos. Is fast and simple, even though I own Adobe Encoder I still prefer the barebones approach of Mpeg Streamclip. Really – it’s awesome, you can set the bitrate of the compression  for video, and the audio, encode to a number of file formats, it’s quick and light. (Tip – make sure you check ‘better downscaling’ otherwise videos look whack. Dunno why this isn’t always on by default.)

Movie Draft

I was looking for some screenwriting software and I came across Movie Draft. I DIG IT. I believe Final Draft Pro is the gold standard, but it’s pricey. For someone who’s not using screenwriting software everyday I find Movie Draft to be more than adequate. Friendly GUI, I think one guy made it and he writes about his depression in the app’s news section which I find somehow makes the software more personal. Movie Draft can read and export to Final Draft, it’s uncluttered, I’ve learned the keyboard shortcuts for switching between the different modes of writing (dialogue, action, slug lines etc…) Cost me about R400.

Snapz Pro X

Another invaluable piece of software for taking screengrabs and recording on-screen video. I take a lot of screengrabs for giving notes (to animators recently) by email, and I find Snapz Pro X works super well. Runs in the background so a keyboard shortcut brings it up anytime, you can click-and-drag over an area to take a screen snap of something, or snap a window, or snap the whole screen. It can also save to the clipboard so I can just open Photoshop, create a new doc and ‘paste’ and the pic is there ready for me to draw over. Someone I did a job for bought it for me, was $60 I think. A bit pricey now by South African standards.

Dropbox

I have a Pro account, it’s like, 1TB space or something. I’m nowhere near using all of that space, but it *is* a safe place (I hope) for all my finished work. It’s $10 / month – bit pricey, and I don’t use its syncing function because that chows my data, I have an iMac and Macbook Pro and I’m trying to figure out a better file system to make sure not everything syncs between them. But, I use the web browser uploaded to stick up finished work for safe-keeping. Hard drives fail, and I recently had one swiped from me. So, in the cloud I place my trust.

Audacity

Also for audio work, when it’s something really quick and simple I need to do and don’t want to load up Ableton Live, Audacity does the trick. It’s free too.

Max

Another free program, when I have WAV files (normally from Ableton Live) I want to export as MP3’s for sending my email, I use MAX. Just drag-and-drop the files into the browser window, click ‘export’ and boom – whatever preset was set up gets to work. Not only for WAV to MP3 but will convert a whole host of audio files to a number of formats. Sometimes I don’t necessarily want to open the files in Audacity, so this is a good converter.

Adobe Acrobat Pro

For making PDFs, digitally signing PDF’s (seriously, I don’t like printing out a PDF just to be able to sign it, scan it and send it back. I rather open it in Adobe Acrobat Pro, sign the PDF with a Wacom tablet and re-save the file and email back – no mess, no fuss, no wasted printer ink or paper). I also use it for reducing the size of PDFs for emailing, and collecting multiple files into a PDF – it’s great.

Indesign CS6

I never thought I’d use this but I dig it lank. I designed my bro’s THE KIFFNESS album on this, the Moosebox bible, and a couple other things that require pretty precise vector printing. Great with a lot of type and laying out multiple pages for a book – it’s a goodie. So less frustrating than trying to do a hack job in Photoshop.

Illustrator CS6

I don’t use this too much, but for logo work and some other finicky stuff for when vectors are required, it’s great. Some people mostly work in Illustrator, I’ve learned to work in Photoshop and quite like the graininess of working in raster, but then I miss out on the benefits of being able to print nice and razor sharp with vectors and upscale without pixellation.