Toon Boom Studio Express, a value-priced solution, is a must-have animation tool for all your creative projects.

You can use it to create great animations for your personal and corporate web sites, interactive projects and games, Flash banner ads, videos, PDAs and phones and anywhere else you want to add eye-catching animations.

Here are some key features of "Toon Boom Studio Express":

Content Creation
· Feather Edges
· Line Styles
· Photographs Animation
· Alpha Onion Skinning
· Content Creation
· Pressure sensitivity for variable width lines
· Digital light table
· Contour editor tool
· Free Transform tool
· Skew tool
· Sketching and cleaning tools
· Convert lines to brush
· Select Scene Operator
· Drop Shadows
· Different pen settings for Pen and Eraser
· Scissors tool
· Text tool
· Cutter tool
· Standard drawing and shape tools
· Onion skinning
· Outline onion skinning
· Rotary light table
· Standard field chart for cartoon animation
· Bitmap vectorization
· Scanner support
· Drawing in 3D scene planning
· Erasing with graphic tablet and digital pen
· OpenGL anti-aliasing

Ink and Paint
· Unlimited color palettes
· Unlimited number of colors per palette
· Ability to name and organize color swatches
· Import and export palettes
· Automatic update of painted zones with palette changes
· Color Tranform tool (Flatten option)
· Palette styles
· Templates color management
· Copy paste texture and gradients mapping
· Global palette tinting
· Auto gap closing tools
· Painting with bitmap textures

Lip Sync
· Automatic lip chart generation from voice tracks
· Automatic mapping of lip charts to lip drawings

3D Layout and Camera
· 3D layout and motion paths for animation elements
· Animated elements
· Animation peg System
· Advanced Motion Paths
· Multiplane camera moves and effects
· 3D velocity profiles
· Color transformation and clipping effects
· Copy frame properties to any key frame
· Improved visualization and manipulation of key frames from the Timeline

Reuse
· Global and local templates for reuse in any animation
· Cell-swapping
· Support for all major multimedia files as templates
· Template preview and editing
· Export movie clips as media links for smaller file size

Sound Synchronization
· Support for multiple soundtracks
· Fade envelopes
· Precision synchronisation of sound to frame and time
· Master volume control
· Sound streaming
· Sound scrubbing from the Timeline

Import Files
· Support for Illustrator layers
· Import and Vectorize with Textures
· Import and Vectorize Preview
· Animation: Macromedia Flash SWF
· Vector: AI (Adobe Illustrator), PDF
· Bitmap: BMP,TGA, GIF, JPEG, PICT, SGI, PSD...
· Sound: WAV, AIFF, MP3

Publishing
· Export Snapshot
· Flash Pre loaders
· HTML Embeding
· Macromedia Flash SWF
· QuickTime
· QuickTime with alpha, sound
· PDF
· Color palette export in Flash files
· DV Stream
· AVI
· Image Sequences

General User Interface
· Flexible Docking user interface
· Powerful workspace management
· Fast actions combo box
· Welcome Screen Wizard
· Simplified and improved timeline
· Unified user interface
· Velocity editor button in properties window
· Guide for straight actions
· Project dialog window with presets
· Simplified and improved Export window
· Enhanced dialog windows
· Tablet user friendly buttons
· Undo / redo buttons
· Minimize application when rendering
· File import menu option
· Double click actions
· Real-time playback
· Animation-standard exposure sheet, with support for cycle creation
· Multi-layered timeline
· Multiple undos

Peripheral Support
· Windows Tablet PC (XP & Vista)
· WACOM compatible tablet
· Any device (scanner, digital camera) with TWAIN support


Requirements:

· Power Mac G5 (recommended) or G4
· 512 MB Ram (Recommended), 256 MB (Min.)
· 100 MB of available hard disk space
· 24-bit color display, with 64 MB or 8 MB (Min.) video RAM, 1024x768 resolution
· Wacom Tablet (recommended).


Limitations:

· 30-day trial
· Express limitations: Maximum 2 pegs, 1 camera, 1 scene and 1000 frames

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· New flexible docking user interface
· Calligraphic line styles for a unique animation look
· Feather edges for creating blurs and glows
· Vectorization using textures for bitmap integration
· More peg functionalities, including element orient to motion path
· Over 30 new features including Flash pre-loaders and HTML embedding