Toon Boom Storyboard Pro

Toom Boom Storyboard Pro is an interactive software utility that puts at your disposal a comfortable workspace and handy tools to help you turn your ideas into graphical stories: animations, movies, short clips, and so on.

Installing this program is a speedy and simple job that shouldn't give you any trouble. It welcomes you in a clean and intuitive interface that invites you to create a new storyboard project by establishing a saving directory, name, title and subtitle, in addition to the resolution.

In the following step, the application brings up a fullscreen window with a professional-looking layout and design, where you can use some basic tools to give life to your project, such as a brush, freehand cutter, rectangle, ellipse, line, flatten, paint, text, dynamic camera, pan, and zoom. Some properties can be tweaked, such as the pen size, color and smoothness, together with the text font, size, indent and line spacing.

It's possible to flip selections, rotate the view, convert templates to drawings, as well as use the panel on the right to enter dialog, actions, slugging and other notes, and adjust them along the way as you see fit.

Storyboard lets you put together as many scenes as you want, view project statistics (duration, number of scenes, panels and transitions), and explore a built-in library with template actions, characters, effects, props and sets.

You can rename, split, join and duplicate scenes, jump to a specific one, add new panels before or after the current one, set the panel duration, add transitions, and copy the camera. Multiple layers are supported and they can be similarly administered. Moreover, you can add captions to the panels or entire storyboard, find text in captions, or save the captions layout as default.

Images from external files can be imported as scenes or layers, in addition to sound files. It's also possible to import Final Draft Script or Harmony Scene files, split, extract, merge or insert new files into the project, create and restore backups, or regenerate all thumbnails.

The project can be saved to file and later resumed, as well as exported to PDF, bitmap, layout, CSV, XML, MOV, SWF and other profiles. It can also be optimized by removing unused elements, flattening and compressing all drawings, as well as reducing the texture resolution of all drawings. These are just part of the features available in Toom Boom Storyboard Pro.

Surprisingly enough, the utility's impact on the PC performance was reasonable. We have noticed a slight delay when executing simple commands, though, like bringing up a panel with options or extending a menu.

Nevertheless, taking into account its attractive interface along with rich and advanced settings, Toom Boom Storyboard Pro should satisfy the preferences of many professionals looking to put together movies, short clips, animations, cartoons or other similar projects.