Monday, April 5, 2010

Flipnote Studio AAARRRGGGHHH

Written by pikaby

Warning: Minor Flipnote Studio rant.


Flipnote Studio is great, in some ways. It's one of the most user-friendly animation tools I've seen ever, all you do is scribble on the screen with your stylus, which is infinitely more accurate than using a mouse to draw on Photoshop, and a whole lot less fiddly that using Flash where you have to deal with vector shapes and layer upon layer of animation.

But when you're trying to do a really complex animation you'd probably be better off with Flash. Flipnote Studio, as easy as it is to use, is pretty limited. Number of tools is very few for the sake of getting everyone to make their own animations....Maybe there's a few tricks I haven't learned, but it's frustrating to only have two layers to work with, and only two colors. Imagine what I could do if black, red, and blue could all be used on a single frame.

Two layers also means if you have even more content you want to layer on top, you'll have to either rub some off and draw it in again, or open a new frame and copy/paste from there. ANNOYING.

The selection tool is fine, but the resize tool is not. It only doubles or halves the size of the picture which you're working on, and whatever goes off the screen is cropped off. ANNOYING x2. The cropped off portion isn't limited to just the Resize tool, if you decide to move stuff off the screen just for a moment, the software doesn't allow you to. It gets cropped off if you do. ANNOYING x3.

Sound tools are fine, no complaints there, although more space could be given for recording sound effects. I've seen many great flips which obviously use more than 3 sounds, they're all overlayered into the music, then erased, and then a different set of sounds are recorded, and then put into the music again, and then erased again....Quite laborious.

If you want to properly animate, get rid of the frog at the bottom left/right corner of the screen. It gets in the way sometimes.

Professionals will want to use either x6 or x7. It's the only way to make it smooth and fluid, although you might have to make more frames. (if your patience is that of a Wobbuffet, i.e. damn patient, you can do x8 speed and make a thousand frame animation that lasts something like half a minute only).

I'm satisfied with the thing, but I can't help but feel like more should've been done to make animating work a little less frustrating. I know it's supposed to be tedious but it's things like this that help speed up the process, right?
Share/Save/Bookmark

2 comments:

  1. I agree. it is annoying but its still quite goodI have 2 make a flipnote 4 skool 4 my assignment on flipnote (free choice) i first tried 2 make a flipnote a day or 2 after i got my DSi 4 my b'day 7th May 2010 (i turned 11)

    ReplyDelete
  2. hey got mine in 2010 on chrismas its asome!!!!!!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete