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Review: Storyboard a toon boon to visual storytelling

Posted by Dennis Sellers Apr 25, 2008 at 2:39pm

Toon Boom Storyboard, is a great Mac OS X compatible, storyboarding system for visual storytelling, though it’s expensive (plus you’ll almost certainly want to purchase a Wacom drawing tablet) and takes some time to learn. And it’s gotten even better with version 1.5, which is Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) compatible.
 
Built around frames or shots, Toon Boom Storyboard offers an interface with motion camera capabilities and a set of drawing tools, including a pressure-sensitive brush tool when using a digital graphic tablet and pen.

Toon Boom Storyboard supports industry standard bitmap and vector files. You can add an unlimited number of shots and panels to your storyboard and use customizable and searchable captions fields. The software offers access to true multi-layers vector drawing tools with pressure sensitivity. You can reuse assets from built-in image template library and export your storyboard to PDF using predefined pages or create your own layout.

Customizable caption fields can be used to insert fully searchable textual content, such as scene descriptions and comments, which can save a great deal of time.

Toon Boom Storyboard has a timeline to control timing and automatically generate an animatic with sound tracks and transitions between shots. It also boasts real-time animatic creation with dynamic camera moves and extensive export capabilities, including printing, image sequences, and Harmony/Opus, EDL, SWF and QuickTime file formatting.

Toon Boom Storyboard’s interface presents an elegant (if not initially intuitive for newbies to such software) panel window layout or an overview window layout. Choose a project name, location for the project files, resolution and the broadcast standard from the opening screen, and up pops a customizable storybyout. Choose a project name, location for the project files, resolution and the broadcast standard from the opening screen, and up pops a customizable storyboard window. Individual panels are added by default at the bottom of the screen and displayed in sequencde as you work on your project.

When you’re first using the app, you can start out with the included ready-made templates. Once you get the hang of things, you can move on to the more advanced tools for jobs such as developing multilayer panels. The primary tools are all conveniently located around the edge of the workspace.

Storyboard artists will appreciate the drawing layers and intuitive vector drawing tools which facilitates the animatric process and speeds up the review and approval process. There’s complete pipeline integration and you can review, update and reorder digital panels easily. You can also access storyboard drawings from other panels, the software’s library of existing drawing and sounds, and the library of other storyboard projects.

Storyboard’s output-option lets you export the various layouts as PDFs, which is very convenient. I also wish it had support for SWF-output and a nonlinear feature.

If you need a Mac-based storyboarding system and don’t need all the bells and whistles of the pro version (US$899), at $249 Toon Boom Storyboard can be a toon boon to your visual storytelling.

Toon Boom Storyboard requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher; a PowerPC G5-equipped Mac; 512MB of RAM; 90MB of hard disk space; an ATI or Nvidia video card with 128MB of VRAM; and a monitor supporting 1280×1024 resolution and 24-bit color depth. A Wacom tablet for drawing is recommended.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10

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