February 3, 2009

Digital Video S.p.A. Launches Story Planner

Rome, Italy - Digital Video S.p.A, the research-and-development arm of 2D software maker Toonz, has released Story Planner and Story Planner Pro, new tools for creating storyboards with graphical and textual information, as well as generating animatics with soundtrack and animations.
Developed on the base of expert storyboard artists’ suggestions, Story Planner is a management tool designed to facilitate the creative thinking process and simplify the workflow in cinema, advertising, animation, and video games industries, increasing the production speed, saving time and cost.

Story Planner allows a streamlined creation of a storyboard with sketches and notes laid out in an unlimited number of panels describing the flow of the story. Sketches can be created with raster-based drawing tools, or any image can be imported; captions and notes can be added and formatted. The story flow can be organized in panels and scenes; camera movements and other graphical elements can be used to define actions in the scenes. Storyboards can be printed out, or exported as PDF files, according to a custom page layout.

Story Planner PRO adds the ability to compose complex animatics in a timeline editor. The timeline controls the animation of the camera and of graphical elements placed in sketch layers. Audio tracks can be added and edited to create a sound track in sync with the animatic, and fade and dissolve transitions can be used. After a real-time preview, the animatic can be generated with a single-click command.

Both versions are available for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X running on PowerPC and Intel processors.