Should You Switch to Toon Boom? Maybe Not. [Scribble Kibble #96] 

who needs flash or toon boom when you have powerpoint!

Why is this even a debate? Scratch beats them all.

It took me about 1 month to transition from Flash to Toon Boom, and when I say that I mean literally working minimum 3-6 hours a day with practicing with it. It was a grueling process. I had made a similar video like this at that time and my sentiment was largely similar. While I ultimately switched, I don't like how the universal recommendation was "TB is superior in every way to flash!" because it DEFINITELY IS NOT. It worked great for me, but I don't wanna say that'll be the case for everyone. With how much I knew in Flash and the number of plugins I had, I prefer Toon Boom only slightly to it, enough to make a difference, but still. (And I went for the Premium version.) I still plan to use Flash for animatic / drafting work here on out. (My recent project kinda told me that TB is too rigid for boarding.) My biggest descriptor of them both: Flash is more 'immediate.' You can move components and items and frames around as much as you want. Flash works awesome if you can trust yourself to keep organized and you can rearrange stuff as needed. Toon Boom is more 'preserved.' Drawings get saved so you can repurpose them at any time. Color pallets can be redone whenever you want. The flipside is a drawing layer will ALWAYS be just for those drawings. You can't move stuff between layers. But, the advantage of this is stuff won't spontaneously break, and the library can be made incredibly powerful, implementing canned animations into just small components of a rig. (Plus, having a Z-axis and spline deformers are very very useful, as is parenting to replace nesting.) Flash handles loops 100x better than Toon Boom, and you don't realize how much you miss those until you don't have them anymore. TB they have to all be copy-pasted repeatedly. And honestly TB sets up kinda a catch-22 with itself. IMO it's only worth it to switch at the highest levels, with the node view and deformers, but if you NEED that kind of power, you're probably so acclimated to flash that switching is most difficult. Also, just some workarounds to a few cons you mentioned (not perfect, but workable): For Toon Boom, you mentioned updating rigs can be a hassle--while you can't have separate document tabs open, you can have multiple copies of TB running, with different docs. You can drag and drop between them if you need. Otherwise, reloading from the library is about identical to moving stuff between documents in Flash. Just documents take a little longer to open in TB. And some tricks to go between AE and Toon Boom is to instead export layers via png sequences, rather than .mov exports. Setting the write node to PNG4 gives you transparency, and disabled layers won't show up. While not infinitely scalable, size changes shouldn't be drastic since it by default exports to 1080p. For scenes, you can get something comparable to Flash if you make use of copies of the 'display' and 'write' nodes, allowing you to render multiple scenes simultaneously, even, while switching displays flips between them. You do have to set it up yourself, but it's an option.

There are other 2D animation programs, but the big debate is usually Flash vs Toon Boom. TVPaint and CaCANi are two I'd like to try.

I've been using Flash CS6 for the past like, 5-6 years. I've totally given up on puppet animation because of the limitations at this point. I'd say if you're into simple hand-drawn animated things and got a quick drawing arm, Flash is good enough for some home projects and having fun with practice/animating stuff. If you're going into the animation industry, then learning ToonBoom is pretty much a requirement for some studios out there. It's good knowledge under the belt.

The drawing tool is the main reason I changed from Flash to Toon Boom. I love drawing in Photoshop and hoped Flash was the same, it`s not, Flash was making me hate drawing anything.

flash does everything right except for art and i can't understand why.

I'll give my two cents, seeming as I moved from Flash to Toon Boom a few years ago. 1 - Expensive. I'm not going to argue this point, but if you are a student, this point is moot. The student version is so much cheaper, and you get all the nicer features. If you aren't a student, this point still applies, but just note that students get a discount (so do Flash users, but it's not as drastic). 2 - Although Harmony doesn't work well with other software, it doesn't need to. The node view is absolutely a god send, and although After Effects is a little more powerful, if you are an individual animator, you probably won't need the entire After Effects power (and the node view will suit you fine). 3 - Multiple scenes. Keep in mind that Flash becomes more unstable, the more scenes that you have. So, although you lose the ability to work on large projects in a single file, it at least has a good reason for doing so. Additionally, there are free software packages to allow you to merge video, so it's not too much of a biggie. Finally, Harmony allows you to have multiple documents open at once, so if it's that much of an issue, just open multiple at once. 4 - Long puppet updates. Eh, sort of. I personally change my puppet pieces the easy way, by going into the drawing specifically, and then changing it through there. Or, turn it into a symbol and change it throughout the timeline. There are other ways, so this point is sort of misleading. 5 - Big file sizes. This one is true, but keep in mind every time you turn to the render view, it creates a cache. Most of the big file sizes is just that, in my experience. This point is absolutely true, though. 6 - Poor documentation. Okay, again, this one is true. I created a few videos on Harmony, since it was lacking the documentation for me to use. Thus, I wanted to share my experiences. There's also a few other benefits that you didn't mention. The stability of Harmony. The customisability of Harmony. Effects being nicer, and not being limited to a symbol. The animation process being streamlined, and how some features aren't workarounds (unlike Flash). The drawing and scene modes. The isolation of elements to work on them. The list goes on, to make animation nicer. Harmony does have it's flaws, but they are either tradeoffs, or features purposely. Flash frustrated me so much when I used it. It doesn't do anything perfectly, but does a lot of things... somewhat decently. Flash could be great, but it has many flaws that just shouldn't exist, or exist because they are afraid of removing backwards compatibility.

Toonboom is better by far. I've been using Animate CC(flash CS3 when i started) for over 13 years. and then later on (2011) the company wanted us to use Toonboom for a TV series. At first, we were kinda skeptical about it, for us, that time Flash was the best digital animation tool. But later on after spending a month with it. we noticed the workflow is a lot faster and easier. the transition from flash to toonboom was easy, the knowledge on flash is transferrable. Toonboom was built from the groundup for animation while flash was mainly for building website and games & Animation was just a potential addons. For the Deformation tools on Toonboom was a killer, the only downside is the price. 100 bucks a month is a hefty compare to AnimateCC.

I remember I first started out in flash (after moving from the dreaded mspaint) and I thought it was a blessing, after working in it for many years I realized it had a lot of flaws which for my work flow, was quite painful to work around. Eventually I moved to toon boom when harmony was first making its appearance and I tried it out! Within a month I found myself loving the program intensely and I am very glad I switched! When I was in my first year of uni I found out they mostly used TVpaint, which I can see a lot of benefits for but for my personal kind of style of animation harmony was the one! The thing I like about harmony the most is that it has both vector and bitmap options, I enjoy roughing my keys in bitmap and then doing my cleanups in vector! And unlike flash vector I feel it's less glitchy and you have a lot more control over your lines, however one thing that really sold it was that when you rendered your vector animation layers, it would convert them to bitmap and have a very nice quality look! Flash and it's vector often has a very particular look which is quite crisp and sharp and personally I don't really dig it too much so this was a great feature for me! Basically from what I learnt at my years at uni is that personally I find harmony best for very clean lines and animation, TVpaint was very good for more rough lines and styles which is a style preference. Flash has it's own perks and as someone who doesn't use puppets much I can't compare those features to harmony but I feel that they're a lot simpler and easier to work with since a lot of beginners don't understand things like nodes yet! ohmygod this ended up being so long im sorry and wow if you read it all then hi there

And here's me, animating in Krita XD

Thank you so much for giving the pros and cons on Toon Boom! I think this would be a great video to show my cousin and see if he's willing to give it a shot because I told him about Toon Boom a while back, but I wasn't sure if this software would meet his expectation.

This was probably the most well-presented and informative comparison video I think I've ever seen. You must be good at writing essays!

Flash and After Effects are more than enough for me. For my most recent project, I even found a way to emulate the style of Cuphead by using After Effects to roughen up my clean vector lines. In fact, I wonder if anyone (besides Petey) will even be able to tell that it was animated in Flash to begin with? I guess I'll find out when it's released on DAGames tomorrow :p Anyways, good video!

The color picker in flash also works anywhere outside of the program just press and hold your mouse button down on the field color chip holder and drag it over any item on the desktop and it’ll suck up to color when you let go of the button it’s actually very easy

Thanks for lining up the pros and cons! I use TVPaint, but I've been interested in learning the differences between it and ToonBoom, so this helps in my mental comparison chart!

In relation to TB and AE exports, instead of exporting movs of each individual layer, you can paste a write node under each element you want to export as its own layer, and in the write node settings, you can set a folder path and file type (png4 for a png seq with alpha is recommended) . To render everything, you just need to click "render write nodes" and it renders all your stuff separately to different paths (or wherever you directed it) at once. Much easier than rendering .movs of everything each time, and a png sequence will usually have more reliable quality and compressed video files. Hope this helps

You should make a scribble kibble about The Amazing World of Gumball, and how the creators made 2d characters in a 3d environment.

Thanks! This was really helpful and exactly what I needed.

Harmony ftw. It takes practice but once you know how it works. It's a breeze. Just like learning anything

The lion from Scratch21! Cool vid, Crowne :) Personally, I'm sticking with Adobe Animate because $$$ also I've bought this wonderful class from someone you may know (*COUGHCOUGHBUYCROWNE'SCLASSCOUGH* Thanks :)

Thank you so much for this wonderful video!

The color picker and flash works everywhere else outside of flash as well you just have to know how to use it. Press and hold the mouse button on the color chip and drag it to the color you want to grab and then when you let go of the mouse button and the color gets brought into the software even if the color was outside of flash

Hey I got a question! So I have been using toon boom essentials 14 for about a year now and I know how to use it and everything but I do agree with much of the flaws. Of course, I am not a professional and would it be better if I switched to Adobe?

Excellent tutorial, thank you very much!

Yeah boiii,gonna start animating:)

I used to animate long time ago when flash were macromedia....because of my work I needed to start animating again after years, but much more mature, I started straight with toonboom....and I got tell you, there is tools that I still miss, but there are a lot of tools which I love way more and I got reallyyy really used to toonboom short cuts and the node view that does miracles...

Tv paint is arguably the best animation software if u want to produce amazing frame by frame animation. But at the same time it is very time consuming. But when i start drawing those frames. I feel like i am drawing on a paper. Though the animation takes more time to make in tv paint than jn animate/flash. Tv paint makes us fall in love with the process of animating. So if u really want to dive into animation. I recommend tv paint. Currently i am making a animated music video with it. And i am loving it.

Great video! There’s a couple things I’d like to add. An important part of making this decision is who your clients will be! If you’re animating for fun, that’s one thing - but if you are a freelancer or plan on trying to land a studio job, look at the studios you want to work for and see what they’re using. As a freelancer, I can almost guarantee you’re going to need Creative Cloud anyway... so you can assume you’re already paying $50/month for that and the real question is, do you want to pay an *additional* amount for Toon Boom. I get just enough Toon Boom projects in a year to make it financially viable to maintain licenses for Storyboard Pro and Harmony Premium. As far as Animate vs. Harmony, I prefer Harmony. I find it a pleasure to use, whereas Animate gives me a lot more frustration - especially with drawing. I think when you understand Harmony well, the potential time savings are huge - and that’s huge since animation is so time consuming. One of my favorite Harmony features that didn’t get mentioned here is the ability to export from Storyboard Pro directly to Toon Boom Harmony project files. It’ll bring over your audio, your camera moves, and all your art completely automatically! It’s a huge time savings versus setting up individual files, importing audio and animatic clips, etc. One thing that Animate does SOOOO much better than Toon Boom (SBP or Harmony) is cycles. It can be really frustrating, especially in SBP where adding secondary motion to a cycle is a giant headache. In Animate, it’s a piece of cake.

How about Tvpaint? I've thinking if I change tvpaint to toon boom

Nice comparison I'd say. 😉 Can I just ask though, for #3, can't you just encapsulate the scene's layers into folders? And if there's camera movement, just set the keyframe of that to default whenever a scene ends? Basically, every scene is on one project encapsulated in folders and when a scene ends, the camera defaults its position, as if it's a brand new project file. Let me know what you think. 🤔

Thank you for your explanation! I'm recently searching info about Toon Boom and saw there's Toon Boom Harmony and Toon Boom Storyboard, which one are you talking about in this video? And do you know what's the difference between them? Thank you so much ☺️

Another program I'd think you'd like to investigate for the future is Krita. It's a free program with both Drawing and animating setups in the same program. I know I've done some amazing work with it, but I was wondering how a pro in the field I'm going into would feel about it.

Great video! I am curious about the whole AE and Harmony compatibility thing. In Animate or Clip Studio Paint, I just export my scenes as image sequences and drop them into After Effects. I use AE to comp the BGs and Animation layers together as well as some light color grading and audio compositing for my final output. I will be using ToonBoom as well, and now I am a bit worried about executing these simple things when it comes to Harmony. Gonna check your other vids for the info, but if you don't have one yet, I'd absolutely love to see one! All the best, and happy 2024!

So I’m about ready to actually start animating with a program rather than just using clip studio paint. I just do simple 2D animations but I wanted to know which animation program is best to move up on.

You keep inspiring me to watch these things! 😍😍😍😍

Lol thank you for starting with the cons of ToonBoom. I already have CC and your first two cons of ToonBoom convinced me to stick with Adobe. I'm still a beginner so why waste my time with ToonBoom right now

I use harmony in studio. Flash is still the most cost-effective animation software but the perks of harmony for how I use it make it hard to go back. Toon boom can do muti separate renders at once, but you have to make sure you have each scene set up for it. There are some java scripts you can run that help with that. For larger productions, the harmony database is such a time saver, but it is super not for small projects.

I'm getting a computer soon, and really want an animation program, so I want to know which is better

I'll definitely use Flash (I've never animated before) simply because of After Effects. Already having Creative Cloud is a big plus, but all the extra software is well worth it, even if you don't care about Animate(/Flash). Also the Expression system (from Aftereffects, but probably also in Animate) is amazing. (Especially with some JavaScript magic)

l Still Prefer The Program "Adobe Animate"

I've been a user of ToonBoom since day 1 back in 2012 and i have to say that there are going to be difficulties when your coming from Flash/Animate :'DD Like you said, Flash/Animate and ToonBoom are VERY different from each other, so I can't imagine the headache you'd get from trying to re-learn everything. Unless you're required to use the other(in this case, ToonBoom), I wouldn't really recommend doing that but I would say that it IS an excellent animating program that can really do a lot and that it's worth trying out if you can spare the time. Since their both different from each other, I'd also consider it really handy to know how to use both(you might be working with different studios who use different programs, etc), but I don't really see it as a "must-do" if it's not necessary.

May a tutorial for animation on Fire Alpaca or Krita be made for animators that want to stray away from spending money to animate?

I'm planning to use clip studio paint for animation soon. Should I?

If I'm gonna wait a little before testing Toon Boom... Thanks for the advises !

So when you make drawings on a timetime in Toonboom, it adds numbers to those drawings. With every frame you can choose the drawing you want to be on that frame. A problem i found with this is that when you copy and paste frames it keeps the drawing number from before, so if you edit that frame it edits the drawing from the original frame you took it from aswell. You can prevent this by right click> duplicate drawing. or doing paste special and selecting an option to paste it as it's own drawing. This can be quite frustrating. Another thing to note is that it's better to animate with deformers if you want to achieve a shape tween like effect. (don't even try to work with shape tweens in Animate/Flash, it's hell.) You can add deformer bones or enveloppes (shapes with points that you can manipulate) because those work with the auto keyframes. If you try and work with the ToonBoom shape tween (morph) it takes a bit more time to get everything the way you want it, but it should still work. I've tried morph a few times and it does give better results than the shape tween in Animate. (it usually doesn't go all over the place with morphing through itself) The timeline system in Animate is easier to work with for me, because i can copy and paste frames and edit then without editing the original frame. I also think selections and selecting things in Animate works better than toonboom. Toonboom does have better 3D compatibility than Animate. So in the end it's whatever you would prefer working with. But if i had to choose, i would choose TVPaint.

My brain hurts... tbh I didn’t understood anything. I´ve just animated using procreate (not an animating prgram) doing pictures, and puting them togeter as a gif online.

Hello! I¨m actually downloading Toon Boom now cause i had a trouble I wasn´t able to resolve in Animate :( I made my first sketch on Animate and it was awesome. Later i tried to work again on it but the tablet wasn´t working the same.. I don´t know what i did but the line/draw is displazed.. I don´t know if the problem is the tablet wich works ok in other softwares or if i activated something or whatever... i did the research in a lot forums but... now i´m just downloading Harmony and let´s see..

nice video, and what do u think about Blender Grease Pencil?

this is a really fair video, although i do have one criticism with the first con you bring up: while toon boom is expensive, you have the option of a one time payment. it's a huge lump sum, sure, but it means you will own a permanent license for it. if you're planning on using toon boom for years to come, it will be worth it more than a perpetual subscription based system where you don't even own the programs like with CC. overall though, these are decent points! i prefer toon boom myself, but i can see the arguments for animate too!

off topic but i started out on toon boom and tried to move over to flash, so if any flash users could help me understand what the brush tool is even for then id be super grateful because everytime i use it all i get is horrid jagged lines and its... not ok lmao thanks!!

I use Adobe After Effects for Motion Graphics. Making logos jump to music, making backgrounds dim and glow to music. Making Audio Waveforms and Spectrums move to music.

Actually if you're using After Effects with Toonboom, you can use Write Nodes to Render each piece of Animation all at once instead of one at a time. Write Nodes is great for multi-pass rendering.

Hi...would be nice a Scribble Kibble about Moho / Anime Studio... Have you ever tried this program? Seems to bee another nice software and have the pro that you pay for it only once and not monthly...

I have Flash animator 8 and Toonboom Studio 5. Only real thing I ever use Toonboom for is Flash 8 doesn't export well for AVI or MOV if I want to post it to youtube. So I transfer the SWF file to toonboom and make it a MOV. I have been working with flash for so long I can't get use to toonboom despite the fact I had the program on my Comp since 2010

Have you ever had crashes in toon boom when you try to import sound or export

If you're going to do a Toon Boom Harmony tutorial can you start with Essentials. As far as I've heard, it sounds kind of confusing. I'm currently attempting a big project so i want to do everything right. Thanks Also you rock Crowne.

Which one is perfect for a first timer animator

if i may ask, what is a small list of animated movies that amateur animators should watch?

Can you compare adobe animate and photoshop for animating ?

thats a relief, I bought a student version of adobe suite before they went to subscription so im learning on that

can you recommend pc specs for adobe animate?

also to any students out there, you are eligible for the adobe cloud student discount if you are in any form of school! Doesn’t matter what type, as long as you can provide you’re in some form of education you will be able to get the whole adobe suite for $30 a month and have access to every program adobe has. I want to try out toonboom, but due to the price of adobe suite with the discount and the access to the programs I’d rather just stick with adobe ^^

I also love your videos! All of them! CX

TB is superior for an important reason, it works better in ambient light thanks to the nodes. Well, superior is a relative word, it will depend on what kind of work you want to do.

I love these types of animation software based videos. They're so informative and helpful :]! Also I was wondering, have you ever heard about Cacani? It's an animation software that I never heard talked about even though it's hyped itself and has been associated with big names (That internet explorer anime girl animation on RU-vid, Jojos Bizarre Adventures, e.t.c)

I am looking for an animation program with the basic aspects, (Timeline, tweening and sound mostly) but I don't have the kind of money for ToonBoom or Adobe. I am currently using FireAlpaca, but lip-sync and timing are very difficult to get right. (Also I can't find a good editor for my videos either... so if you know any free/ cheap ones, that would be really helpful! [I use windows])

I have a question how can you get adobe after you delete it? After he trial?

My problem is I learned started on Harmony and not sure if I should switch to Flash since it's cheaper.

very helpful!

I prefer toon boom because I'm nore used to it, but all of this is true. I don't know if someone said it before, but at least you can open several harmony scenes actually!! Just like "in separate" open programs, but it can be done

I just want to do traditional frame by frame for the time being. I am also bothered by how quickly heavy Flash scenes get when you add many frames. How do you animate a short in Flash? Just 1000 frames per scene?

I prefer Toonboom over Animate since it's more user friendly for drawers like myself. Only problem I find with it is that when I'm zoomed in, I can't scroll around the canvas meaning I have to constantly zoom in and out at different points. That wouldn't be a problem except I use my surface and like drawing while it's on my knee. So I'm constantly taking off reattaching the keyboard to use the trackpad since when I use the 1 and 2 keys on the touch pad or with a usb keyboard I bought from big lots, it always goes back to that point. So when I perfect a character's jawline but aren't satisfied with his hair, I have to reattach the trackpad. This isn't too much of an inconvenience since it only takes up a few seconds of my time but I'd like to know if there is a way.

Can you check out the darkest dungeon cutscenes? They're similar to the Crypt of the Necrodancer but utilize "stick puppet animation" a bit more. Either way it's worth at least viewing in private.

I love it when the tittle of a video answers the quesstion it's prompted, but the only other reason to watch the said video is to hear the reasons for that given answer. Thanks again Ms.......Mr.................*sucks teeth*......Prince, for another informative video.

I know this comment is late but seeing as how many companies are starting to use toon boom, should a beginner still start by using flash or toon boom if he or she wants for a certain company?

Do you know any free animation softwares with layers or some similarities to adobe or toonboom?

Thank u for this

I just KNOW Toon Boom is gonna be worth it for me. I've used flashed since May 2018 and I REALLY wanna switch to Toon Boom REAL soon. Including when I start my future web series someday.

Don't forget the bitmap brushes, that make harmony almost as good as tv paint for traditional animation.

@Crowne Prince can you make a Moho video? perhaps comparing it to Toon Boom and Flash?

Did any one tryid an open sorce program calld opend toonz . I min is a bit unick end it has a lot of potechal but it also comes whit a lot of problemes as well

i am a beginner animator and have been using flash. is this a good program to start with?

"Pencil", other times called "Pencil2D", is something that I came across when looking for free animation programs last year. If you can help it, don't go for this, guys. It's glitchy and unreliable, in my experience. If it works fine for you that's awesome but I had MANY incidents using Pencil where it would mysteriously drop drawings from totally different files into the middle of my animations, on the same drawing layer, making them extremely difficult to just erase. It was also very finicky about when it would or would not allow you to use sound in your animations in a functional way. Some of my files with sound got corrupted the moment I closed them and I could never open them again. Some just didn't play the sound correctly to begin with. There are other free animation programs out there, I'm sure, and I'm sure others in this comments section have already pointed them out. Don't waste your time with Pencil.

i'm still wondering, should i or should i not spend an ass ton of money to upgrade clip studio to animate more than 24 frames? i really don't wanna learn new software ._.

Hey Crown! Question here. So I heard that Adobe is shutting down Flash in the near future. Does that mean that they are discontinuing Animate/Flash as a software, or just discontinuing Flash as a browser extension? Because knowing whether or not a piece of software will exist in a couple years makes a big difference in my decision. Thanks!

Does Flash work with Huion Display tablets well? if at all?

I've been animating with adobe animate for quite some time. I wanna give toon boom a chance one day☺

My family is Kind of poor, But so Many youtube animators has inspired me to do it to. I use a huionh420 i used my own for money for it and i need an editing program for free, for Windows 10. I cant get windows movie maker what do I do?

I switched to animate from pencil 2d, so I thought animate was complicated. But I think I will need a stronger computer before getting toon boom

So crownie do you use toon boom of Adobe

THANK YOU FOR THIS. I'm a Flash lifer who's been using it since I was a single digit child and had an opportunity to buy Harmony at a discount through work (Still fuckin expensive as hell), but honestly I'm just gonna stick to what I know. Knowing that it doesn't do anything better than AE and doesn't work with it well is honestly a dealbreaker for me, I've long made peace with Flash's drawing. Video much appreciated.

I've been animating with toonboom since about october, its quite a good program. But there are some things in flash that I kinda miss.

What about animating on the phone what good app do you recommend

Well I've been using Toon Boom for years so... I have Studio and not Harmony, so I paid for it once and don't have to pay for it ever again, I can have it on 2 different computers. I've also never learned how to use scenes, so I got a 3+ minute project on one scene.

What do you use?

Very informative, I was almost buying Toonboom

I can't afford anything ;v;🔫

if you want to make interactive animations,animate cc is your choice but if yu want to make it in studios,toon boom maybe your choice

I Knew You'd Make A Vid About This! You Commented On That Tracer & McCree BTS Video!