Hue Animation Studio comes bundled with a Hue HD webcam and some modelling clay, giving you everything you need to get started in stop-motion in one box.
The program has a simple interface with a basic click-and-shoot attitude that’s perfect for beginners. It also
has an automatic onion-skinning feature that allows you to move the onion skin to another frame. However, we noticed that placing the onion skin on a frame other than the current one stops it from moving, which makes it useless for animating frame-by-frame. Still, the timeline is clear and every frame of the animation is shown as a thumbnail, which makes the process of removing, moving or adding frames an easy task.
Unfortunately, once you start editing your masterpiece any good feelings quickly fade. Hue Animation Studio has a sluggish interface, its frame-editing tools lack the finesse needed to draw and type on the frames, and there are no font options for the text tool. We couldn’t edit text placed onto the frame; we had to remove it using the Undo button.
Annoyingly, there’s no general undo function in the tools menu; mistakes have to be corrected manually. Delete a frame accidentally and you’ve lost it – and this could cause major problems if someone does this with several frames at once.
Output options are limited, with a focus on Mac-friendly QuickTime formats over more widely used MPEG4 or AVI files. You can upload files to YouTube, but we’d still like to see more ways of showing and sharing what’s been achieved.
Hue Animation Studio’s saving grace is the bundled HD webcam, which is probably where the cost of the package comes from in the first place. It’s easy to set up and produces high-quality images. Even so, Zu3D does the same job better at a similar price.
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| Software subcategory | Graphics/Design software |
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