Thanks for the responce.

We want to animate cartoon-like drawings of ourselves that an illustrator is doing. If we don't like what he comes up with, we would like to be able to draw, and animate our own cartoon-like images.

We also want to do stuff like draw a funny looking guitar and have it move, swirl, or rotate across the screen. Have photos of our faces move around, twist and turn - stuff like that.

thanks

for the latter part, guitar, faces etc., you could try Ulead 3D Studio. They proably still have a trial version. If you do buy it, be SURE to keep your serial number. If you ever have to re-install and you don't have the serial, they won't give it to you, insisting that you get it from the "original email".

"We also want to do stuff like draw a funny looking guitar and have it move, swirl, or rotate across the screen. Have photos of our faces move around, twist and turn - stuff like that."

You can do this in Vegas now. Import the still, use Track Motion and Event FX features. In fact, you only need to make "key frames" and Vegas will figure out the "tweens" frames for you. There are lots of comments on this board for those techniques as applied to text for cool titles.

"animate our own cartoon-like images"

That's a much more difficult subject. If you only wanted to twist and bend and change color of an image, then think of the image as you would the guitar and apply the same tools. However, if you want the image to be of the band dancing, or say playing the piano, then you are into the complicated world of bones and hinges and skins and textures.

A reasonable compromise is to make images (one for each primary position of the action, in sequence. Think of a comic book, and then think of implied frames that would be necessary to get *smoothly* from the image at the bottom of one page to the image at the top of the next page. Let's take an example:
You standing tall,
You bending over,
You touching your shoe.
You rising to touch your belt,
You standing tall.

That's 5 key frames. You could draw those and then cross-fade between them and get a (rough) appearance of motion. That's the basis of most animated gifs.

"we would like to be able to draw"
Well, now, drawing is an art form. No software will make you a good drawer, just as no software will make you a good musician.

Serif's DrawPlus8 is a drawing tool that will let you draw key frames, and then will build the "tween" frames for you. It won't turn you into an artist, but I can say from experience that it will take my scribbles (or text, it does have some really cool fonts) and render them to animation. The Pump Shown Here took me about 2 hours to do 4 years ago as my first-ever animation, and I'd never used the software before. The gif is 5 frames (see how the pages "flow" with the handle down?)

Serif has PhotoPlus11 which is excellent - it's a photo editor in which (among a zillion other things) you can turn your photos into drawings. Lock your digital camera down on a tripod, put it on multi-shot (say one frame per second), and shoot 15 seconds of motion. Convert each shot into a "pencil" or "paint and ink" or "posterized" drawing. That will take about 15 seconds per frame, including your time to load, modify and save the photo.

Then load the lot of photos into MotionArtist and get a FLASH motion graphic, that you then load into Vegas. Or, just load the photos into Vegas as with the guitar, stretch/shrink across time as appropriate for the action, and crossfade.

You will get nice cartoonish hurky-jerky funny-stop-action comic characters that "sorta" look like you and which you can manipulate as you will without going back to the illustrator.

If you use an illustrator, make sure you get a Work For Hire agreement, or a copyright release from the person. Those images you "pay for" will not otherwise be yours to use in your movie/show/advertisement. Even if you give the video away. Bummer, man, but that's the law. Some dude's lame drawing has just as much rights as do the lyrics for your (soon to be a hit) song.

Someone had posted awhile back by changing the color curves / color correction
you can get a cartoon like images. These still are 3D'ish and
not the cell type "Bugs Bunny" style cartoons.

If you are really want to learn..... Caligari Truespace is my favorite.

I've done some REALLY quick animation-look stuff by mixing 3 Vegas plugins from the VASST site (Edge Detective, CreativEase suite, New Blue Art Effects), and it came out looking pretty close to animation/rotoscoping if you mess with the settings a bit. Well, it's quick to setup on the timeline; it takes a bit to render with all those FX. But who cares? Go get a drink and let Vegas do your work.

Try Anime Studio 5.

http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1913/1/793?sbss=793

Mike