Talk:Autodesk Animator
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Since Animator is no longer supported, I can feel free to promote it. This is without doubt the best piece of software I have ever used. My employer embedded animator files into its multimedia CD-ROMs, and almost anything was possible. It played full screen animations on a 386 (as long as the animations were carefully designed). I have never seen anything that rivals it for handling a palette, before or since. The only weaknesses were poor fonts and dithering, but these problems could be overcome. At the time, Macromedia Director was advertised as the number one animation tool, but in comparison to Animator, Director was awkward, amateurish, very limited and painfully slow. Since then, Director has greatly improved, and Flash makes it a high quality animation tool at last. But back then it was laughable in comparison. But I remember it being promoted as an animation tool, and as a result it took me years to take Director seriously. The same can be said for other DOS and Windows based animators of the time. Another thing I liked was the crisp, clean animations. Most bitmap based animation formats (e.g. AVI) use lossy compression. As a result, animations created in Animator can become five or ten times bigger, and look much worse, when converted to AVI (depending on the codec used). My large Animator files played smoothly and beautifully even from a two speed CD. O.K., I have raved enough. I really, really liked this product. Please note that I refer to Animator Pro. Animator Studio (the later Windows version) was a brave attempt to incorporate 24 bit color and sound, but it was buggy and slow, and nothing like as useful as Animator Pro. Animator Pro is sadly missed. - Chris Tolworthy
