Which Application?

This is a comparison of two different pieces of computing software that can be used for creating animations. I will be comparing Toon Boom and Adobe After Effects.

Before I begin though I do think it all depends on what type of animation you want to produce, each application has its different pros and cons but they are really good at what they are made for, for example Flash wasn't really made for creating proper 2D hand drawn animation like Toon Boom in my opinion, instead it is used for web adverts, games and other multimedia rich content, where it takes great advantage of the scripting tools built in.

Toon Boom Studio 4

Toon Boom is a great application where you create the animation frame by frame. It has a drawing area, layers, exposer sheet, timeline and drawing tools, all you need to make great 2D animation.
For drawing you get a choice of a brush, pencil or pre drawn geometric shapes which you can resize and edit to your liking. All the options are customizable as well, say you want to make the line bigger or smoother you can, and if your using a graphics tablet you can also set the maximum and minimum brush sizes that change depending on how much or how little pressure you put on. It also has a feature called “onion skin” and what this does is show you the previous and next frames that have something on them and draw what should be between them, this is great as it allows you to have two keyframes and then draw the middle frame while keeping everything flowing like it should.

Adobe After Affects

After Effects is a whole different method for animating and produces a whole different type of animation. Instead of drawing each frame one by one this gives you the ability to keyframe two points the program does the animation for you. Although this doesn't allow you to have a more fluid action that you would get drawing it yourself, so its only for a certain type of animation.
A few good points about After Effects is that it allows you to import a Photoshop (PSD) file and it keeps all the layer information so certain layers can be hidden or moved easily, the advantage of this is that you can create all the objects before going onto animating them, or create a vector image in Illustrator and export that as a PSD file. It also allows you to parent a object to another so when the parent object moves the linked object or objects also move with it, and then if you want you can still move the child object without effecting the parent but still be linked if you move the parent again. This worked great for me last semester when I had to animate a corkscrew, I was able to parent everything to the main body but still move the arms up and down and the screw up and down as well, and since the illusion was to be that it was flying up, when I moved the body up, everything came with it.

Personally I don't prefer either of these applications compared to one another as they both produce different types of animation and are both equally good as one another and both really easy to use. In the end I think it would be great to use both products and create a truly great animation.

Below are two animation examples of what could be produced, although not necessarily where, with each application.

Toon Boom



Adobe After Effects