creating a short film (2d) need to find an adequate program. help?

[Totoro]

If you're working with photoshop bg I would advice you not to use Flash coz Flash isn't that powerful when it comes to working with pixel related images. Especially if you wanna pan bg's, the pan doesn't run smoothly.
Adobe premiere is more for editing your animation so it's not really a program to animate.

Are you planning to animate on paper or directly into the computer?
Mirage is a 2d animation program you can use if you plan to animate directly into the computer. You can achieve a lot of styles with it, you can also color your scanned drawings in it I think.
You can download a trila from their site
http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/home_LP.php

Other programs are Animo and Toonz but these programs have a more traditional approach. If I'm correct you have to draw your frames on paper and scan them in to colorize them. I think it's quite an expensive program.
http://www.animo.com/index.htm
http://www.toonz.com/index.htm

I would try Mirage coz it's not a very difficult program to learn and you don't have to scan your drawings coz you can animate directly into the computer.

[d-e-l-a-c-r-o-i-x]

mirage seems great, but one thing bugs me, does mirage come with 3d rendering aswell? as some demo animations has used 3d within their animation. if premier is an editing tool, would it be adequate to have mirage as the animation software, and premier to edit it, put soundtracks, sound effects? etc? the animation would be pretty large so what format can i save it under?

[Totoro]

Mirage doesn't have a 3d rendere if I'm correct. You can render passes in your 3d program and composite your 3d scenes in Mirage like color correct, motion blurs etc.

Yes, you can use Mirage for your animation and edit your animations in Premiere. I'd recommend you to animate your scenes in different files that way you don't have large filesizes and it's more organized.
I usually save my animations as avi files with divx codec or as mov with photojpeg.

[d-e-l-a-c-r-o-i-x]

i am very grateful. thank you for helping me.

[d-e-l-a-c-r-o-i-x]

oh another, if i was to purchase a 3d program to transfer it to mirage, or just an overall good one, which should i take?

[Totoro]

Well, I can't say which 3d program you should purchase, it depends on your personal experience. Maya, 3D Studio Max, SoftImage, Lightwave, Cinema4D are the well known 3d programs. Go to their websites and download the trial versions to see which app suits you best. Or you can do a search on the forum to see what other users think.

I think it doesn't really matter which 3d program you use coz Mirage supports a lot of file formats. So if you render your 3d scenes in one of the following formats you can import them into Mirage.
Format Support



Advanced interoperability with most editing solutions (Final Cut Pro 4, Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress and Media 100).
Export Projects to any formats (different resolution/framerate/etc) on the fly.
Support for all standard industry formats including Microsoft AVI, DEEP, Apple QuickTime®, AutoDesk FLI and FLC, CompuServe GIF, Newtek FLYER CLIP and RTV, BMP, Kodak CINEON, ILBM, JPEG, PCX, PNG, SGI, SOFTIMAGE, SUN, TGA, TIFF, and Quantel VPB.
Direct import of Macromedia Flash (SWF) files directly into a layer (QuickTime required).
TWAIN
AVI DV file support
OpenDML file support
NTSC 480 RTV™ file support
DPS Reality file support
5 different available alpha modes (Import and Export) such as Pre-Multiply and Non Pre-Multiply for better software connectivity.

[cg_flipper]

Although Mirage is directly compatable With lightwave- In the way that you can link the programs together to paint texture maps for you 3d models.

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