Hey there I'm new to the forums and wanted to ask the various users here what do you think the easiest to use, most flexible, all encompassing 2d animation program available for a student besides flash.I would like to be able to scan all of my hand drawn animations or bring them in as digital stills, have them quickly cleaned up, and easily painted, and able to lip sync and add sound in one package if possible. I have been using Premier, Photoshop, Encore and After effects (occasionaly, like premier better). So far I have discovered there are TAB 2.0, Toon Boom Studio and Mirage. Mirage is the most expensive, not sure why though, so which do you think fits my needs the best.

-Are there demos for those programs? I am not a big 2D animation enthusiast so I can't really give you an answer.

Yep.

There's Toonz and Animo, that are used at the studios I work for: complete solutions for Ink and Paint, coloring and compositing, but they are prohibitely expensive. (They will render out to feature film movie quality, though)
Chromacolour CTP is a bit less fancy, and a bit cheaper (although still expensive for normal users, and mainly used for TV productions. Just checked their website and they seem to have cheaper student versions as well, going up from $99,-; you might want to check that out)

I know Mirage from its previous incarnation, NewTek Aura - the first version of this program was a giveaway on a Digit magazine CD a couple of years ago. It is nice for animating directly into the computer with a Wacom tablet, it offers an onion skin light table mode and unlimited layers, but the version I used had no real dopesheet function.
It has a twain driver, so you can scan animation drawings directly into the program.

Take5 is a standalone linetester for the PC without coloring or compositing: so is Ernest.

Digicel Flipbook is mainly a linetester as well, but offers additional coloring capacity. It is still affordable, but it is a bit picky about the capture cards it needs.

As for userfriendlyness I would only know about the linetester parts of the programs: I never had to do my own coloring or compositing, as these are specialized jobs; I stick to pencil animation only.

Message edited on: 09/23/2005 05:45

Message edited on: 09/23/2005 05:49

I had just looked at Adobe Illustrator CS2, and it traces drawings, makes them into A line drawing, then you just drop in the colors with the color bucket. Check it out and see if that is maybe something that will help you.