With all the great conversion benefits video brings to your homepage & website, its no surprise that businesses of every size now require a video. Because of the cost and perceived difficulty in creating a professional live video, animated videos have become a popular video format for smaller businesses and startups. If you are interested in making an animated video for your business, here are 5 great tools you can use.
Go Animate
Go Animate is the easiest solution of the 5 and is based on a drag and drop creator. Go Animate lets you select short clips and assemble them yourself plus add a script to the clips. No technical knowledge is required and with plans starting at $39 it is also very reasonably priced.
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is an animation program developed by Macromedia that was later acquired by Adobe. One of the big advantages of flash is its easy to embed on websites and is found on almost all desktops today. Flash is also a vector based program meaning the quality will be great no matter what the screen size is. Its main disadvantage is that flash isn’t supported by mobile devices. One way to get around this is to convert the file afterwards to HTML5 but this solution doesn’t always provide an ideal finished product. Still, it is an easy way to create animation without significant technical expertise or knowledge. Almost all the banners in the world use flash.
Flash has been used in animated TV shows and movies including ”Waltzing with Bashir”
PhotoShop
Photoshop has an advanced timeline feature. This allows you to combine multiple pictures and transform them into a GIF animation or even a full video. The main problem with GIF is that it doesn’t always look as clean as Flash. The one advantage of using Photoshop is that many users are already familiar with Photoshop and therefore the timeline allows you to create an animation without learning a new programming language or layout. For example, if you need change the image size in the timeline, you will probably already know how to do that.
Here is an example of a GIF animation we made for Viewbix using Photoshop:
Muzivu
Muvizu is another animation program that allows you to create animated videos with little technical expertise. The main feature that separates Muzivu is it allows you to add 3D “blob” characters into your videos. Muzivu has either a pay as you go plan or an unlimited plan for £150.
Here is an example of one of their “blobs” in action as taken from their homepage
Anime Studio
Like Flash, Anime Studio is a vector based program. One of the big advantages of Anime is it allows you to turn a picture into a vector by utilizing tracing. Anime also has a feature called “Global Rendering Styles” which allow you to quickly change the overall design of your animations almost instantly. As opposed to Flash, there is no programming language that comes with the studio although one can be purchased and added separately.
Here is an example of someone using Anime Studio to create bone animation