For simple animations, like animated icons and such, I use Photoshop CS2, or
Gimp, (Google will usually yield basic tutorials on the subject).
But for more complex animations, I’ll use a combination of different software…
For frame by frame animations, I start with Photoshop or
Gimp for content creation.
Then I use
VirtualDub along with the
Xvid codec to compile the image frames into an .AVI file(s).
And then I’ll use
LMMS for music and sound effects, and
Audacity for recordings, sound effects, and to compile the final audio into a .WAV file(s).
Then finally,
I’ll take the video(s) output from
VirtualDub, and the audio track(s) output from
Audacity, and compile them in
Blender’s sequence editor to make the completed video.
Also, for the more complex animations, the whole process is not so straight forward as mentioned above…
As I usually make a story board animation sequence first, compile that, then work on the audio and match everything up in
Blender.
And once the audio and timeline are good, I'll go back and make the final animation frames, then I'll make the new, final video file(s) from those frames.
Once that's done, I would then go back to
Blender again, and put it all together one last time.
