A TvPaint vs ASP thread would be more informative to me as it could highlight areas of improvement in both software.
Well, I never thought of TVP and ASP really being in competition as TVP is geared directly towards hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation and Anime Studio is built for "cutout tweened" animation like Flash or the much superior Toonboom.
I can see TVP being in competition with say... Flipbook or Toonboom (and it IS in competition with both) but Anime Studio? No. At least not YET until TVP adds a good cutout feature. For now, they're two very different pieces of software designed for two specific types of animation.
So yeah, Toonboom and Flash are Anime Studio's biggest competitors, not TVP.
Beta tester, cool, this means the software is still in development!
Yep, it's constantly in development just like Anime Studio. I think there's gonna be some really cool stuff coming.
A bit late to chime in, but I don't look into this section regularly.
TVP is a great program. It is as powerful as Photoshop, and like that each user will only use a subset of all of it's functionalities. The price is totally OK - for a professional. As a beginner or hobbyist you only need the standard edition, which still is pricey enough - but hey, look at Adobe's prices!
You need some knowledge in animation and drawing, and you have to be prepared for a steep learning curve. But then you have a software which allows you nearly total freedom of style. Even if you don't do animation TVP is a good drawing program.
The user interface needs some time to get familiar with. Part of this is due to TVP's complete platform independancy: it works on Win, Mac, Linux. And the nice part: with only one licence you may install a Win version on one PC and a Mac version on another, like for at work and at home, and it all works with the same dongle.
TVP has its drawbacks. The camera and multiplane tools are far from being intuitive, which is the reason I do that stuff in AS. Files can get big very fast - which is quite normal with bitmap-based animation. Integration into a studio workflow doesn't come for free, you need discipline and a strong production manager.
But it was one of my best decisions to buy TVP. It's stable. It's amazingly fast even on my old machine, and I was surprised to find how good it still worked with a 10 GB file - while I have only 1,5 GB RAM. I especially like the combination of TVP and AS and continuously shift files from one to the other and back again.
funny how all of this talk about TVPaint is going on now I was just looking at news about version 10 and also noticing how cheap the standard edition is in relationship to the pro. It also lets you use one audio track. It seems like the older standard versions didn't support any audio tracks. The brushes look really nice!