i have a copy of “Animate” shipping to me in the next week. does anyone know of any good books (or sources) that can get me up to speed with the software quickly? i have downloaded the quickstart lessons from the site but they seem vauge and also didn’t always seem to work when i tried to follow along with the PLE version.
i am making the jump (leap) from Flash after 10yrs simply because i am tired of the bugs and lack of support with the last 3 versions.
Hey mate,
The help file that comes with Animate should help you out but still you will have to learn by trial and error. Then again, its not the hardest software to master and you will benefit from the transition. I have been working in Flash for ages as well and I had to do a shitload of tricks to do accomplish the same stuff in animate. You will need to add after effects in your pipeline though, animate is not a complete animation package…Good luck!
thanks for the info.
yeah usually trial and error is the best approach, i just wanted to use it for a project i am currently working on and time isn’t a luxury. i will have to mud through CS4 until i can devote time to the learning curve. i actually re-installed CS3 cause it was more stable.
what exactly do you mean by “animate is not a complete animation package”?
Well, I can’t use animate on its own, I always use it in conjunction with After effects even though it has a camera. You always need titles and editing your scenes is very hard in animate. It is easier to render out each scene and edit it in AE. But you will only need After effects for easy tasks so the learning curve is very low.
i guess i didn’t look closely enough at what Animate did before i purchased it (not the first time it’s happened). the lack of a text tool will present problems since i do educational animations and quite often there is text involved within the animation along with my characters (not just a title or credits) so i can’t discard Flash entirely 
i actually use Sony Vegas to do any final compiling and sound editing since it has a much more powerful track system than AE. i usually export my scenes as image sequences out of Flash and then bring them into Vegas so i am used to doing the final animation in a different program. does ToonBoom Studio have the ability to do full length (30 min+) animations without resorting to an external video editor?