Bone Rigging
Bone-rigging is a fast and efficient alternative to tedious frame-by-frame animation. Add a skeleton to any image by pointing and clicking to create bones that overlay the parts of your image, to control arms or legs for example. Then bring your image to life by moving any individual bone point to create the pose or motion you want, while keeping your project organized with the sequencer and timeline.

Revolutionary Smart Bones
New in Anime Studio Pro 9, Smart Bones is an incredible feature that reduces or entirely removes distortion around your character's joints - specifically around knees and elbows. Group a set of points and use the Smart Bones control levers to create 3D looking motion that you can easily repeat with the turn of a dial. For example with Smart Bones you can control facial expressions and head-turning on a character with simple lever movements instead of having to touch each bone point. Smart Bones makes it MUCH easier to repeat complex movements and control your rigged elements.

Import Photoshop Files
Import your existing Photoshop files with all layers intact. Changes made in Photoshop instantly appear in the imported file in Anime Studio, allowing you to continually refine your Photoshop document. Many Photoshop features are supported in the imported PSD files, including blending modes, layer opacity, smart objects and smart filters. Groups are also supported and can be set up in Photoshop to automatically get imported into Anime Studio as switch layers for quick animating.

Real Time Media Connection
The new Real Time Media Connection in Anime Studio Proautomatically updates image, movie and audio files in your imported Anime Studio files when edited in an external program. This is a great workflow enhancement for individuals and production studios alike.

Editable Motion Graphs
The single most requested feature that our users have been asking for is finally here! In Motion Graphs, the animation channels of the current layer are displayed graphically, rather than just as points along a line. Now get maximum control of your animation with Editable Motion Graphs. You can now edit motion curves with Bezier handles directly instead of relying on tweening, ease-in and ease-out.

Global Rendering Styles
Global Rendering Styles allow you to quickly change the overall design of your animations. Choose from various presets such as sketchy, cutout, crayon and more to easily transform the look and feel of your entire animation. Create your own custom combinations by mixing and matching different styles for fills and outlines.

Vector Shape Selector
Quickly find and edit vector layers using the Vector Shape Selector. You no longer have to worry about naming each layer to find the one you're looking for. Just click on a shape in your project and the corresponding layer automatically gets selected for editing.

Character Wizard Brand New Content
Hundreds of new characters. Quickly design ready-to-animate characters using the built-in Character Wizard. Select a preset, dial in the body proportions and choose from dozens of predesigned 2D components such as hands, feet, mouths, eyes, noses and heads.

Automatic Image Tracing Use Your Own Artwork
Import your scanned drawings or existing images and photos then convert them to vector drawings with the click of a button. Trace as black and white or edges only and adjust a number of settings to style your vector image. Color your vector art, resize without loss in image quality and animate it using bones.

Audio Recording, Sound Effects and Automatic Lip Synching
Add a soundtrack and lip-synching to your animations! Record your own sound clips inside Anime Studio and adjust the pitch from high to low to fit your animated characters or import existing audio files into your project. Anime Studio will automatically insert them into your timeline, where you can adjust the timing and length to fit your scene. Using the Sequencer, freely move multiple sounds along the timeline to adjust syncing. Anime Studio supports WAV, AIFF, MP3 and M4A formats.

Built-in lip-syncing in Anime Studio is a huge timesaver. Simply load a sound file, and from the layer options of the layer you wish to synch, select the sound file from a pull-down menu. Anime Studio does the rest. Easily synchronize characters' lip and mouth movements to a sound file through a simple and intuitive process.

Layer Comps
Export multiple layers individually with one click. Layer comps are useful if you want to export only selected items in your scene so that you can composite them externally in third party software. For example, you can create a layer comp that relates to background elements, another that relates to characters, and another that relates to foreground elements or titles. Turn groups on and off until you get elements that logically belong together. Then create a new layer comp from that group. At render time, you can then choose to render specific layer comps as a movie file.

Flexible Import and HD Export Capabilities
Anime Studio can import several kinds of other media files into an animation project. Import QuickTime®, AVI or MPEG-4 video or even 3D scenes from Poser. Image Based Modeling allows you to create 3D objects from 2D vector layers. And the included Content Library contains hundreds of ready to use characters, props and more.