Since there’s no place to leave a review on the internet, I’m saying this here in hopes people will see it in a google search.
I have had so many problems with this software. The ONLY reason why I use it is because I can use it for free through my college. I have the Pro version, which feels like using a free program.
First of all, the layout is too crowded, and it’s completely unintuitive. You will have to spend hours learning every tiny step to do the most basic things. There are so many ways to mess up when using this program.
IT SHUTS DOWN UNEXPECTEDLY OFTEN. Sometimes I’ll save my work and the drawings are gone. I have to close and open the program multiple times to get them to come back. I can’t paste cells from one layer to another because it just converts the cells to the frames on that layer that I already drew. I can’t use the symbols I spent 6 hours creating because NOTHING I have tried doing to make it animate has worked. It just edits the symbol permanently. These are just the problems I’ve had in the past two hours.
THIS IS THE MOST FINICKY PROGRAM I HAVE EVER USED.
Every single problem I have I google and there are posts after posts with people having the same/similar problems. THEY ARE NEVER RESOLVED. Take a moment to look at the forums and see how many people struggle with this program before you waste your time trying to use it.
Thank you for the feedback. Our dev team is continually working on improving our products and your feedback, like the feedback we receive from all our users, is valuable data for us.
Regarding the program shutting down and your drawings being lost: It could possibly be something that is happening due to a conflict between your computer and our software. If you have a specific project or scene that is running into this issue a lot, please reach out to our support team at desk@toonboom.com and they will happily help you troubleshoot all of the issues you might be encountering and help you solve them.
If you are a newer user of our software, we always recommend learning Harmony best practices from our fairly extensive Learn Portal, located here: https://learn.toonboom.com/
It contains step by step guides on how to get you up and running on our software in the most effective way possible so you can start animating almost right away. It also contains notes on our UI and advice on how to best set yourself up for success.
Our Toon Boom Discord Community continues to offer help to all of our users daily ranging from how to build scenes more effectively to what a specific keyboard shortcut is for a tool. Our community is a powerful free resource that every Toon Boom user has access to and it is completely free of course! Also, our Toon Boom Community MVP team is also on Discord to help out with almost every question you can think of. If you wish to join our Discord, please follow this link: https://discord.gg/syAjy4H
Toon Boom also has extensive documentation for each version of our product that is a good reference guide that explains what every part of our interface does. You can find that here: https://docs.toonboom.com/
While your first impression of our software may not been positive, we hope these resources help empower you to bring all your future projects to life in our software.
I agree on some aspects here. It seems that developers don’t use their program on a daily basis. If they need to create some project fast, they’d see the program’s basic flaws, like not relying much on keyboard shortcuts, what slows work down. Instead of creating tutorials for newbies and suggesting a manual (what is also good, but doesn’t solve basics), they should ask the best TB animators what to improve to speed up workflow. Then implement those changes.
Labeling software as “the most finicky ever used” really? How many different installations on different computers have you experienced? How old are you? How much experience do you have with how many different programs? Not what have you dabbled with, what have you been trained on? What have you read? Have you taken any courses or workshops teaching how to use Harmony? How long have you put any knowledge to use?
I am skeptical of critics who do not recognize system conflict vs. software flaws or that something is different vs. difficult. Sure easy is easy. Unfortunately, some things require you to exert effort and work to master them. So many people pick things apart because they cannot jump in and do something with no time spent learning the product.
The internet provides a platform for everyone to voice their opinion. You describe yourself as a student using the software because it is free. I am a hobbyist who has read and watched and experimented with everything I can find on Harmony. I don’t know poop and I don’t like everything about it either. Is there anything more people should know before deciding whether our opinions matter?
I was trained in this program for two years through my college. I’ve used this program 10-20 hours a week for those past two years. Every computer I’ve used this program on has had these issues. It’s not just one scene, not just one incident. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. I’m not just a student at this point, I’m a college graduate. I had to use this program for my senior project and lost HOURS of work because this program randomly shuts down or glitches in some way. The only common factor is this terrible program. I’ve been trained in After Effects, Photoshop (which is like animating on a flip phone), and Animate. That’s just animation. I’ve been using computers in general since I was 12. That ten years of experience, and this is still the worst, most confusing program I’ve used.
Congratulations on how well read you are in this program. Unfortunately, knowing a lot about a terrible program doesn’t make it better.
This isn’t my first impression, this is the result of suffering through using this program for years. There’s no point in contacting you for help. That will just waste more time I’ve lost because your program doesn’t work correctly. There’s no reason why this program should have issues depending on the computer. Good programs work on all computers.
I agree with you. It’s obvious when watching toonboom employee’s tutorials that even they have different ways of using the program saying different things work better. There’s no reason for discrepancies between the information toonboom is including in their tutorials.
These are all issues with the paid version, too. My school pays for this, but it sure feels like I’m using a beta version. And I’ve just lost an hour of work, for the second time in two weeks. Absolutely unacceptable.
There is a difference between a 12 year old and an adult. It does not serve your point of view citing how young you have been most of this 10 years.
It is interesting that you run into the same problems on multiple computers. The software has run on my three computers, all Macs, maybe the platform or OS is a factor?
“The only common factor is this terrible program.” Well maybe when you overlook YOU being a common factor.
We greatly appreciate the feedback and I have taken note about all of the ideas contained in this thread and will be adding them to our request bucket that we continuously refer to when making product improvements for the future.
With that said, this thread feels like it has run its course and the thread discourse is all over the place, so I’ll be closing it.