The software offers animation features for creating a variety of styles of animation, including traditional frame-by-frame animation, key-frame animation, cut-out and photo animation. When you start the program, the workspace is divided into three panels: Drawing View, Exposure Sheet and Timeline. Tools are arranged (as you'd expect) in a toolbar on the left. There's a row of menus and important buttons at the top. Two of these control the Onion Skinning that let you view X frames before and after your current drawing as a "ghost." This lets you see what your current frame should look like.

A talent at drawing certainly comes in handy with Toon Boom Studio. However, if you're not a decent illustrator, you can download and use clip art from the Toon Boom web site. To start off I'd suggest using the Drawing layout with a canvas, inks, timeline and the animation frames as found in the Exposure Sheet. When it's time to compile all your animated goodies into a movie, switch to the Scene Planning layout to add props and animate the cameras using such tools as the Scene Manager.

Toon Boom Studio uses a camera in a virtual 3D environment to set the action. You can set up multiple "virtual cameras" and use them for your work.

Toon Boom Studio has a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it -- and Toon Boom Animation includes some excellent help files, great tutorials and some nice templates to get you started. Once you have a handle on how to use the software, you'll be amazed at what you can do with such tools and features as Lip Sync (which analyzes sound files and is completely language independent -- cool!), the ability to set up the action in a 3D space, drag and drop and sceneplanning tools. You can add some nifty special effects via features such as the dynamic drop shadow effect layer. What's more, you can publish your animation projects for TV, HDTV, the web -- even for an iPod.

Toon Boom has always been a top notch program. Now Studio 4 sports: more customization options; extended animation styles to import, vectorize and animate photographs; a larger selection of brushes; enhanced design quality with blurs and glows applied on drawings with the new Feather Edges feature; enhanced motion capabilities to set more realistic moves with the new peg’s Orient to path feature; and advanced web publishing options to play back animation on the Internet more efficiently. It also includes a Vectorize Preview window, improved drawing tools and Alpha Onion Skinning.

Toom Boom Studio 4 is a great app for animation. It's powerful, reasonably priced at US$399.99 for new users, and, after you've gotten a handle on it, a lot of fun to use.

System requirements are for a PowerPC G4 or better or Mactel, Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later, 512MB of RAM, 120MB of hard disk space, and a 24-bit display with 64MB of VRAM. You'll also certainly want a Wacom tablet for illustration purposes.

Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10