Toon Boom Storyboard early release

Toon Boom Animation today released an early version of its Toon Boom Storyboard, a storyboarding system for visual storytelling. Designed for traditional and paperless methods, Storyboard helps users take an idea and translate it into a visual story that will become a complete animation. The software was designed in conjunction with expert storyboard artists and speeds up production planning, offering increased production integration. Storyboard provides a flexible layer-based panel display with motion camera capabilities, a complete set of drawing tools which include a pressure-sensitive brush tool, and customizable caption fields to insert fully searchable textual content, such as scene descriptions and comments.

The application also offers an advanced timeline to control timing and automatically generate an animatic with sound tracks and transitions between shots. Storyboard delivers export functions for printing, image sequences, and Harmony/Opus, EDL, SWF and QuickTime file-formatting.

"Toon Boom Storyboard is a must-have tool not only for storyboard artists but also for directors and producers. On one hand, it offers advanced drawing capabilities in an elegant panel window layout and the ability to preview the animatic in real-time with dynamic camera moves. On the other, Toon Boom Storyboard brings the production pipeline integration one step further by enabling producers to review and shuffle unlimited panels digitally and maximize the use of their existing assets", shared Joan Vogelesang, President and Chief Executive Officer at Toon Boom.

Toon Boom Storyboard is now available as an Early Access Program to all animation studios using Toon Boom Harmony and Opus. The commercial release, which will support 2D animation, 3D animation or live action, is scheduled for release August 1st, 2006, and will be launched at SIGGRAPH 2006. The software will be available as a Universal Binary and will require Mac OS X 10.4 or later (along with a 128MB of graphics memory).

Filed under: software
Other story tags: video editing