Creating animations
* Pro Motion is a low cost, feature packed paint program that is especially designed to create frame based animations. It supports FLIC files, Animated GIF and a private animation file format.
One of the strong points of Pro Motion is the handling and creation of images and animations with 256 colours. It offers full control over the palette.
Pro Motion can be extended with plug-ins to support more file formats or to add image processing filters. A good example is the PluginMaker plug-in, which modifies frames in Pro Motion under control of a user-written program. A plug-in to add support for EGI extended FLIC format is also available here.
* Plastic Animation Paper is a professional, easy-to-use cel drawing program (to create frame based animations). It is especially good in creating cleaned-up "inked" drawings from initial "rough sketches". It’s light box (onion skinning) is convenient to use.
* Already mentioned, Chromacolour International. is a good source for hardware and software for both traditional or computer-based animation.
* Paint Shop Pro by JASC Software, Inc. is a nice program for drawing and image processing. Notable for Paint Shop Pro is that it can save the alpha channel in a separate file in the .BMP format (although the extension is .MSK). These (alpha channel) masks can be used with AniSprite.
* TVPaint by CiS is a full featured paint and animation program.
* Video editing programs, like Adobe Premiere, can be put to good use for animation as well. Next to the transition effects and the general image processing filters, these programs also provide support for sequencing and synchronization.
