Hello and welcome to this review of animation studio.
So you may well have come across things like Toonly and Doodly and this animation
studio, it's by the same people who brought you video builder and video robot,
one of which I like, one of which I didn't like.
And they've made an animated explainer platform that you can use on the Web.
And I'm going to review that today.
And it works in much the same way as Toonly.
You have your scenes down here and you can
add scenes and reorder scenes and you build things on screen.
It's at the moment forty seven dollars for
the basic package and that that's for lifetime.
When you consider Toonly is 67 dollars,
then it starts to not appear to be such good value compared to Toonly.
And we'll look at that later.
Although it does have some strengths over Toonly and it is Web based.
You can do it on any device without
installing and your device doesn't have to be that powerful.
We're going to go down here.
We've got animated stories.
So these are stories that are premade.
Yeah, there premade and their templates really.
You get this screen when you load and
sometimes things can take a long time to load and that can be a little frustrating.
I will be honest. This looks like an electrician.
So it's a two scene electrician video if I play that.
Are you looking for an electricity
contractor in the area? Well, we're ready to help with any electrical needs.
I'm going to pause this here just to talk about something.
I want to go back here.
The characters you get are actually very good.
The drawings, I think, are ready goods and in some way surpassed Toonly.
You notice that this electrician just sort of floats in.
You can't do any walking movement like you can in Toonly once you position people, if
they are non static, they do things, but they just do things on a continuous loop.
I don't think that's hugely important in explainer videos, but it's just something
to be aware of in Toonly you're able to make people walk and you can pick the
actions they're doing, taking a photo, being on the phone.
You can't in this.
So this chap he just moves his head,
whether it be to replace the hard to reach light bulb or wire and tie.
Oh, no, something's up.
And we do it all.
We are like ooh his long 28 seconds clip, so anyway you get the idea.
So we've got quite a lot of these premade ones.
A lot of these premade ones.
And if you pay for the, deluxe package, you get more premade ones.
And I wouldn't really adapt premade
and one of the reasons is you just might as well make your own.
So let's talk about this.
We can go back, we can go forwards and we
can play and we can use this timeline to scrub and move the cursor.
We can go back five.
I think we can go back.
This one goes back five seconds. This one goes back.
Let's go right to the end here at 28.
If we want, we can add additional seconds.
We can add things in one second increments and we can take away seconds as well.
But if we go to this slide, this is it makes my point fairly obvious.
You can't go lower than twelve seconds.
So I actually want to do a scene that's less than 12 seconds.
I can't because it's just not possible.
So let's look at colors for a job estimate debt.
You can see he's just moving, bobbing up and down.
That's just moving, bobbing up and down. And that appeared.
And then they'll all disappear probably.
Oh, okay.
The objects are animated as well.
And of course, you can import your own objects.
You can search stories here. Not particularly useful.
Here we have graphics. Now this is one of the major bugbears.
Here we have are are scenes and our stories.
And again, they seem to be business to business.
They seem to be niche businesses.
As with all these other products that this
company produces, we've got quite a lot of scenes here.
And if we want to add something, we have to add it from a scene.
So we're going to make a new projects, new projects just to get rid of everything.
So we're going to add a background.
So let's add this traffic background. So we.
So we click it, drag it and eventually it appears.
So now I want to add some graphics. So we do.
But you can't search the graphics.
Any elements you want to find, you have to find by the picture.
So let's say we want to have a plumber or a construction worker on the road.
Well, we'd have to look in that picture.
And then we click to add this guy.
So if I play, he just moves the clouds,
move and the background moves, which is really good.
And it looks very good as well.
Notice we can't do anything with him other than change his position.
But if I go back to graphics, it takes me right to the top.
So if I'm scrolling through, if I scroll
all the way to the bottom and I want this Bakary van,
there's no way to go back to I was if I go
back to graphics, it takes me all the way to the top again.
So finding the objects and people and actors you want and then putting them in
is a little bit frustrating.
You get loads and loads of actors and
objects, and the choice you get is very good and the backgrounds are very good.
And you also get additional bonuses.
But finding them and then pulling them in.
It's as though the UI hasn't been made particularly well.
So what we can do is we can make each objects or person bigger or smaller.
We can
move them to the back or the front.
So let's send that backwards.
So we want him to go backwards.
So he's behind this plumber man. Yes, we can do that.
That's good.
We can flip horizontally.
And we can flip vertically, which is quite
useful, and we can delete as well as customizing the size.
We can change the duration they're on the screen for.
So I can have this appear at two seconds and have it disappear at four seconds.
So two seconds. Two seconds.
Is it going to come inand out?
Four seconds.
It's going to go out and we can have the transitions
via this bit so we can have this come in for one, take one second to come in, and
if we double click this, we pick how it comes in.
So I think it can come in like that.
And we click apply.
So let's go back and watch this.
So it sits there and then it disappears.
So we might want to put this rather than
want to put this, that, oh, put the trap at the crossing.
And then four seconds.
See that this is the problem with it.
This is quite fiddly.
I find, I find that quite,
I find this really quite fiddly.
Zoom out again.
Okay, so let's let's play that back.
OK. So this baby we're going to put there
and we want it to coincide with.
Yeah, we'll put the baby there.
Hey baby, I need to be there for a second.
And then.
Baby can go to there.
Transition in
transition.
Transition, out.
Oh I don't know baby can,
Yeah that'll do. Right, let's watch this scene unfold.
So unfortunately, using these paddles is really, really clunky.
And also, if we go here, we have both the baby and the bakery van.
But you can't see the baby
because it's obscured by the bakery van, which is a real shame.
So we only have one layer to see what we're interacting with.
It doesn't go vertically, which is a real shame.
Now, again, I can't lower my scene to less than 12 seconds.
I can add scenes.
I can duplicate scenes, I can reorder scenes by can't lower them less than 12
seconds, which I think is a real disadvantage.
We can add text, so lets add some text. There we are.
There's text.
Let's make it really big.
It's not bubble writing or anything. It's just this.
We got standard fonts and we can do some text to speech.
Which again is is useful and we can also do a voiceover.
Let's add something in text to speech,
baby and a
bakery van.
So we'll have Amy talking. Hello.
My name is Amy.
I can be your human like text to speech engine in animation studio
and we will enable for the selected text and that text displays there.
Now, again, you can see the text here.
How do we want it to come in? There we are.
Right. Let's play this from the start.
This is the baby and the bakery van.
Okay, so we can do our standard things.
We can save our projects.
Give it a name, baby and van.
So we've added text. We've added a
nimation's if we wanted, we can do a voiceover.
We've got background music and we've just got this music here.
We could go to a music library.
We've got some background music here.
Let's listen to Moose MP3.
That's enough that we can simply out those
by just adding them in there, close this off.
So we've got moose instead of what we had before.
We can change the background setting.
We can do a voice over if we want.
We can add a voice over and we can add a voice over by using the text to speech.
Which I think some people find quite useful.
I don't know why you'd want to use a
pre-built script about dog training or whatever.
It just saved you having to type something out.
But there we are.
So we can voice over either via a computer just by typing or you can do it yourself.
We can add a watermark, but we'd have to upgrade to agency and we've got our undo
on our Redo buttons and then we can preview the whole thing.
This
is a baby and a bakery van
And you see again, what it did there was it ran for the whole twelve seconds.
Even if you didn't want it to.
So we've also got some bonuses and you can download some bonus things.
But again, with these products, you have to download them and then reupload them.
So.
So I've got here some bonuses that I previously downloaded.
So let's add some money so that money appears.
But it doesn't stay within my user profile.
So even though I've updated this before, I
have to upload it every time, via this image thing.
I talked about things that I thought were good.
So we've got bonus backgrounds and I'm
going to add a new scene and we're going to go to that.
I'm going to add on these bonus backgrounds.
Some of this stuff you get here is really good.
So this hasn't come in as a background is come in as more of an image?
I think that's pretty good.
And we've got as well, we've got lower thirds and we got bonus characters.
So here's a bonus man walking.
And I think this this animation, you know this well.
This is a good cartoon animation.
So here he is. He's walking.
Now, if you saw that, you would think
that's a fairly professional, not a 47 dollar Web based animator.
Again, each time I have to upload it.
So I need to keep those download files to hand and easy to find in my computer if I
want to use any of those bonuses. We can export.
And again, because I don't have agency, I can only export at 720.
However, it takes an awful long time to export.
And then it downloads into your browser.
So it's a mixed bag.
It is so much cheaper than something like pontoon.
It is cheaper than Toonly.
It has less functionality than Toonly.
It's around that price.
It has some things that I think it does better.
And it has some things that I think it does not do better.
The user interface is frustrating in some cases, and it's frustrating that you are
stuck with a 12 second clip and you can't do anything about it.
One of the things that is probably going to be quite useful is just having a plain
white background and things that are quite good.
So you can do very well with this, but
this could be vastly improved, in my opinion.
Thank you. Goodbye.