Software I use for my work and WHY

if you ask me what software i use i probably sent you here and you fell into my trap haha welcome to my doom but in all honesty this is kind of a sequel to my last video where i talk about software that you should be using and the conclusion to that is use whatever software can get the work done for you unless it is a requirement to use a certain file format or a certain methodology that requires a software but i also want to talk about software that i use and why i use them [Music] hey guys it's nico panto and today i'd like to talk about software that i use and why i use them and these are software's that i've used for over five years now and i've used these softwares very consistently some of these software's i've actually used for more than eight years and some of them actually more than a decade ever since i started learning animation and a lot of these softwares have been my bread and butter for a long time especially when it comes to making my own original animation so without further ado let's begin the first segment i'll be talking about the adobe creative cloud because i use more than three adobe products for my work i think the adobe creative cloud is going for about 80 bucks right now i'm not sure as of this video i think it's about 80 bucks but the adobe creative cloud has almost every app that you can have to create content so if you use something like the adobe creative cloud consistently then it might be worth it also a lot of the adobe software kind of intermingle with each other and i'll get to that later on so first off i use photoshop in photoshop i use it for general stuff whether it's drawing illustration sketching i also use it to paint and i also use it to do backgrounds for animation i also use this for storyboarding surprising or not like i said in most feature films that i've worked on we always boarded in photoshop accompanied with flicks or adobe bridge but yes i storyboard in photoshop using the layer comp method which i should talk about sometime i prepare slides and pages for pitch bibles books portfolios through photoshop and i use another adobe software called adobe bridge which allows me to turn them into pdfs or turn them into contact sheets if i need to so yes let's talk about adobe bridge pretty quickly again i use it to organize storyboards i use it to export pdf files for pitch materials for portfolio materials online and if you want to have a spreadsheet of all your storyboard panels like let's say 15 images in one spreadsheet you can easily turn those panels into a contact sheet through adobe bridge but what's also great about adobe bridge is that with the browser you can actually change the order of your panels so if you were boarding using separate image files and rearranging the orders you can use adobe bridge as sort of like a pin board or a virtual pin board and after reordering them in adobe bridge you can batch rename it so you can actually put them in an actual order so when you look at your files in windows explorer or any other browser it will be placed in order the way you intended it from after using adobe bridge you can also use adobe bridge to batch compressed files but i usually just use it for storyboarding purposes pdf formatting portfolio and pitch packet preparation also adobe bridge is free so if you're using some other alternate software you can still use it with that adobe animate or formerly known as flash i used flash since flash 5 before it was under adobe it was under macromedia for a very long time it was my go to animation software ever since i picked it up back in middle school flash has been a huge part of my life for a long time ever since the new ground stays i give it all my credit for getting me into the animation scene so again i've used flash for many years it's a vector program meaning it doesn't really use pixels it uses vector uses computer information to display shapes and vertices and points i'll have to talk about the advantages and differences between raster based bitmap-based programs and vector-based programs like flash but the thing i loved about flash is that it was really easy for me to use it was easy for me to get into the library system is easy to understand so if you just want to create symbols and reusable assets it's so easy to do that in flash it's great for casual animation but i've also animated series projects with it one of my short films crayon dragon was made out of flash a lot of my later work used flash because it is a program that i'm really familiar with and it's something that i can totally do work with one thing i will say about flash is that i also use it for storyboarding and animatics and there's a very specific reason for this flash has atrocious drawing tools and because of that it makes me bored much more looser and it encourages me to just keep going forward without trying to fix a drawing which you can easily do in something like photoshop nowadays i don't use flash or adobe animate as much because i've actually switched to other animation softwares which i'll talk about now but i still use flash if i want to make corrections if i just want to do casual animation or very quick animation that doesn't really need finessing however because flash can also export swf files it's so easy to import those files for adobe after effects compositing another thing that i'd like to add about flash is that if you're learning animation and you have access to adobe creative cloud i still think that it is a pretty good software for that you can make great work out of flash and i don't want anyone to dismiss it immediately but one of the reasons why i choose other animation software for more serious work is because flash's drawing tools actually got worse some elements of flash they made it better for animators such as being able to flip between different drawings and keyframes but somehow they managed to make the drawing tools much worse and at that point i was just like nah man i gotta move on but if you can overlook that i think flash is still a capable software adobe after effects i always use adobe after effects and i've used it for a long time and i still see myself using it for a very long time from now on i use it for animation compositing motion graphics effects and casual visual effects if i need to when i talk about compositing i mean combining the animated characters with the backgrounds with the light effects with post filtering effects and other bits and pieces to make a turd look actually pretty good i casually call the animation compositing stage the polishing the poopoo stage what's great about after effects is that you can also import psd files and its layers as separate things remember when i talked about doing my backgrounds in adobe photoshop well this is where i do my backgrounds in photoshop and save it as a psd i import those as a psd into after effects and it imports each layer separately which is great for foregrounds backgrounds and other elements also i can have photoshop open on the side so if i make changes to those layers and save it it'll automatically update it to the after effects composition file the same thing goes with flash files when i export them into swf files i can make those changes instantly through flash and it'll automatically update into swf files which are vector files which is great if i want to bump up the resolution and not have any quality loss or not having blurry images through pixels but even if i did my animation in another program i can export it into image sequences and after effects can actually import those image sequences into a footage so again i've used it pretty much for all of my compositing for any animation project that needs complex compositing i use adobe premiere for video editing so if i have finished shots from after effects i import them into adobe premiere i use adobe premiere to edit my videos for youtube just edit videos in general or make animatics out of storyboard panels and when i'm working on an animation projects with storyboard panels i can start replacing my panels or the storyboard panels with actual finished shots what's great about adobe premiere is that it's kind of like after effects where it kind of intermingles and communicates with other adobe programs so if i wanted to do last minute compositing or i need after effects i can actually link a section of my adobe premiere into its own adobe after effects file and when i make changes to that after effects file it changes live on adobe premiere i also use adobe premiere to use different video codecs if i need to for rendering and to combine both music and sound so those are the main adobe creative cloud softwares that i use and as you can see i use more than three adobe programs and some people ask me is adobe creative cloud worth it well if you're using more than three different softwares and you're taking advantage of all of it and how it kind of has its own ecosystem i personally think it's worth it and i really rely on it when i make income out of it but at the end of the day it's how consistent you use a program how much you need it and how much you're willing to invest in it and take all of its advantages but if not there are affordable software that can basically do the same thing for much less it's just that the adobe programs that i've used it's become second nature for me and i don't have a desperate need at the moment to change and that time might come tv paint is currently my hands down favorite animation program when it comes to td animation to me it feels like paper and i think it was the second animation program that i heavily used after migrating from something like adobe flash the first film i made using tv paint was wolf's song and soon after that tiny nomad in fact a lot of my current work has been done in tv paint such as a dream bandit's proof of concept and the recent city of secrets trailer that i did for victoria ying out of all my favorite animation programs that i've used it feels the most traditional for me like you have the freedom to paint your frames rather than in flash or any other vector programs where you kind of have to work in a very specific way back then i like to describe it as you can paint it like in photoshop but it animates like flash tv paint is a program that i've used consistently since 2012 i've learned some hacks tips and tricks to make the process go faster to the point where i got much faster at it than if i were to use a vector program like flash which has advantages like reusable assets in the library system but to me drawing on tv paint has given me such a joy and freedom that i never found in flash but again unlike flash tv paint is a raster program it's a bitmap program like photoshop so if you were to zoom up really close you'd see pixels what's great about tv paint for me is that it's easy for me to do hand-painted light effects because they also have blend modes they have clippings so i can paint only within the solid mattes that i made for my characters and what's great is that you can export each of these layers into separate image sequences so if you were to do more editing and after effects you have the freedom to do that but yes for me tv paint allows me to be more experimental and it feels closest to animating on paper for me at least toon boom harmony or just harmony alone is what i currently use for vector vector-based animation meaning it doesn't use pixels and it uses vertices and shapes it's a vector program like adobe flashes harmony is a lot more complex than flash not just because of its capabilities but it did take me a while to learn how to use it how to do the basic stuff that i need to so the learning curve for this program was pretty complex for me at first so i had to make some adjustments so i don't keep hitting the wrong buttons that would make me do the work that i'm not supposed to be doing work in but once you get the hang of it and once you change those keyboard shortcuts so you don't keep pressing those wrong buttons it's actually a really good program and some of the features that are in harmony i wish were in tv paint but again one of the reasons why i switched to harmony was because most of the industry they use toon boom harmony for their animation production so i wanted to try it out but i also wanted to learn how to make complex rigs in the future and that's the benefit of why a vector program is important again the features are more advanced the animation tools for our sublime which is well known for its great node system which is powerful and i'm still learning how to use node system in not just harmony but in also other programs such as blender harmony to me is a more animation friendly version of flash because it really feels like i'm an animator when i use it i flip i set my keyframes i also use the exposure sheet if i need to and it's so easy to reuse drawings rather than copying and pasting previous frames i'm still wrapping my head around the library system or how symbols are used in toon boom but i see myself having a strong feature using toon boom storyboard pro is honestly a software that i only started using recently because well in most feature animation productions that i've worked in we've always boarded in photoshop so storyboard pro was mostly a tool that was used in the tv department after using it for quite a while storyboard pro is an amazing software i can edit my boards into an actual video with sound effects camera moves much more simpler than how i would do it in flash and if i wanted to make an animatic i didn't have to make separate panels and you know arrange rearrange them and time them out in adobe premiere i can do it all in storyboard pro now again the drawing tools aren't as advanced as something like photoshop and i'm okay with that it's better than flash that's for sure i mean flash again you know it would be f-tier when it comes to drawing tools but you know what storyboards or storyboards they don't need to have a finished look because that's not going to be the final image so it's great if you want to board loosely if you want to have a lot of poses it's something that only started picking up recently so i'm kind of breaking the rule of using software that's more than five years here this has been less than five years but then again i can see myself using this one for a long term i use obs or open broadcast software for streaming and recording tutorials i record footage too and i use it to document my process i've been using obs since the end of 2015 because the first video i did for youtube the first time i recorded footage i was using like a trial version of camtasia or some freeware i found but it wasn't as soon as i discovered obs i realized that this is the program that i needed that can record at a pretty good quality of process work for long sessions and guess what it also streams too so if i wanted to stream to youtube to twitch to whatever platform i can do that through open podcast software when i made my introduction to 2d animation video course i used obs to record all the process footage all my lectures etc etc i use it to stay productive so when i'm working on a personal project i force myself to record footage so it forces me just to work on the project and nothing else now there's other software that i use but i don't really use them as much as i use the other programs only now i'm learning how to use a program like blender because i think it's important for me to get back into my 3d days when i used 3d studio max and before that moire 3d but the thing with blender is that not only is it free but it's also really powerful and the things that people have made with it have become so inspiring for me to just try it out for myself and ever since i tried it and played around with the blender gurus donut tutorial i really fell in love with it i use audacity for recording my voice right now uh the voice that you're hearing right now is recorded through audacity like blender it's a free program but anyways going back to blender the reason why i want to use blender more is because of the grease pencil and i want to actually implement more td animation along with 3d backgrounds or 3d assets or maybe a 3d camera move where a character is running around through a 3d background last but not least i use another free program called handbrake that allows me to compress my high quality lossless videos for online viewing handbrake has saved my life so many times when i had a file that was let's say two gigs worth i can bring it down to a hundred megabytes or even less all the original student films that i did for calarts are high quality apple prores codec rendered files that are like yay gigs high but handbrake brought it down to something that's just 200 megabytes in fact i'm using handbrake right now to compress all my uncompressed avi files from high school all my old high school animation work for a future video and just bringing it down to a more modern small compressed file so if you want to make youtube videos or if you want to make a full tutorial package and it's easy to download handbrake is a great tool i think handbrake is also used to rip dvd or blu-ray files but i just use it to compress that's all about the software but what about hardware well the hardware i'm not really going to talk about that much because i can just talk about it really quickly i use a wacom 22hd as my main tablet and i've had this one since 2012 and it still works great i don't need to change it anytime soon as for my microphone i just use a yeti blue mic i don't see myself being a serious youtuber or professional youtuber so as far as audio and video goes i'm fine with what i have right now as for my computer or the pc i built it back in the end of 2016 so the parts i have is a gtx 1070. the processor is a sixth generation i7 and right now this computer has about 48 gigs of ram and for five years now this computer has served me pretty well but that's because all the animated content i make i always render them in a standard hd format of 1920x1080 i do want to build another new pc and maybe i'll make 8k videos i don't know 8k 2d animation oh boy but if i'm going to upgrade my computer it's going to be a big upgrade but if i see myself doing the same type of work that i'm doing right now then i don't think i'm going to need any upgrading in a long time unless i really decide to invest heavily into the 3d scene and full-on 4k video editing but other than that not really anyways those are the tools that i currently use and these are tools that i've used for a very long time and some of them are kind of new but i see myself also using them in the long run for the future i'm pretty sure i'm going to also get comments like why not make the switch to clip studio or any other program why not just switch entirely to blender you're doing yourself with the service not learning blender but in all honesty i don't need to i am learning those programs but i don't see myself switching full time to those programs because i become so adept with the programs that i currently use but whatever programs i use there is a specific reason to why i choose those programs like i said i don't use flash as much as i used to anymore because i've switched vector programs to toon boom but flash is something that i've used in such a long time that i'm fast with it and i can make casual stuff out of it whereas harmony is a bit more complex and i save it for more complex vector programs first of all i kind of want to apologize where i keep saying oh software doesn't matter but at the same time software does matter if you have a specific reason for using that software and also software is important to know if you're trying to look for a program to get started in because a lot of people don't know where to start or what to look for in a software and honestly that's fine and all the softwares that i've used i've learned from the internet flash is something that i've learned when watching new grants cartoons tv paint was something i learned because the upperclassman at calart started using it which was actually influenced inspired by the students at lego blonde so i think the software question is important and if you can try them out and see what best suits you some people like flash some people hate flash some people love tv paint some people hate tv paint or some people intermingle different purposes for each program so some people will do the rough animation flash and we'll do the clean up in another program like toon boom or tv paint or clip studio because those have better drawing tools than flash's crappy brushes but those are the softwares i use those are my thoughts and i hope you enjoyed this video okay bye interested in learning hand-drawn animation or learning how to finish an animated shot from beginning to end have a look at the store where you will find the complete introduction to 2d animation video course tutorials and other resources learn classical animation approaches drawing lectures techniques and other process videos visit the store through the link in the description below

Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 61,194

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Id: W_Q_ZASET2E

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020