Storyboard Pro is a popular tool among storytellers, directors, and creatives worldwide. It helps you organize and develop your ideas, structure the story’s sequence, and share, pitch, and promote your content on your terms. This comprehensive solution includes drawing, scripting, camera controls, animatic creation, and sound capabilities. Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with Harmony, making it easy to quickly bring your content to life.
Scripting Integration
Storyboard Pro is a versatile tool that can accommodate any stage of your project. Whether you began with a script or prefer to write while drawing your boards, it supports you in keeping your story at the forefront. Import your full script from any source, and easily add captions to your panels by dragging and dropping sections from it. Additionally, if you used Final Draft to write your script and organize your scenes, shots, or panels, Storyboard Pro can automatically generate a storyboard from a .fdx import, with scene breakdowns, naming, and captions included.
Drawing Engine & Tools
Storyboard Pro, powered by Toon Boom’s renowned drawing engine, allows you to seamlessly work with both vector and bitmap simultaneously, pushing the limits of your creativity. The Brush tool, designed to mimic the feeling of a real brush, makes sketching and drafting more responsive than ever. You can set up advanced brush attributes, add textures to your vector lines, and see them update in real-time as you draw. You can also modify your lines and convert bitmap lines to vector (and vice versa) with or without textures, giving you endless possibilities.
For those who value precision, Storyboard Pro offers a rich library of rulers, guides, and grids. You can work in an Isometric view for gaming production or create a fisheye view of your shot. Set up proportion grids for perfect compositions, or mirror your workspace to view your work from a new angle.
With Storyboard Pro, you can create complex images with multiple layers, utilizing texture shading, transparency, and overlays. It allows you to work efficiently and take your boards to new heights.
Built in Cameraand Multiplane
Storyboard Pro offers a built-in, full 3D environment that you can activate at any time. You can manipulate all your layers on all three axes simultaneously, allowing you to create immersive worlds. The camera in Storyboard Pro can be placed or animated on two axes at a time, or converted to a 3D camera. This eliminates issues with parallax. You can also time your camera animation on one panel or extend its movement over multiple panels, giving you the flexibility to convey the desired action effectively.
Animatics (Timeline Editing)
Storyboard Pro automatically organizes your panels in sequence on a timeline as you create them, forming the foundation for your animatic, a video representation of your storyboard. From there, you can adjust the timing of your scenes, add transitions, time your camera animation, and even animate each layer of a panel to create smoother and more engaging movements for your story.
The Storyboard Pro timeline is designed to meet the needs of even the most demanding video editors, allowing you to edit multiple video and audio tracks, adjust durations with the “ripple subsequent panels” on or off, reposition your in/out points dynamically, or cut and insert portions of your edit.
You can export your animatic in multiple formats, in parts or as a single rendered video. Storyboard Pro now also allows you to export to Apple ProRes, which enhances full compatibility with industry requirements. Apple ProRes codecs offer an exceptional combination of multistream, real-time editing performance, excellent image quality, and reduced storage rates. They support all frame sizes (including SD, HD, 2K, 4K, and 5K) at full resolution, and you can use rulers and perspective guides to guide your drawings.
Sound Editing and Effects
No animatic would be complete without sound, and Storyboard Pro makes it easy to add as many soundtracks as you need from the most commonly used formats. You can also record your own temp track directly from the timeline if needed. You can link any audio clip to your storyboard panels to ensure that you never lose sync or lock background sounds in place throughout the editing process.
You can do your audio mixing directly within Storyboard Pro by adjusting audio levels for multiple or individual clips, dynamically adding keyframes, and monitoring audio levels to avoid clipping. To give your sounds more character, you can open the Effect Stack view and add a variety of effects. If that’s not enough, Storyboard Pro allows you to export your entire sequence as a merged or individual track in a variety of formats and quality.
3D Integration
We understand that creative projects can be demanding, which is why Storyboard Pro is designed from the ground up with a fully 3D environment. This allows you to not only manipulate 2D planes on multiple axes, but also import 3D assets, incorporate them into your panels, and animate them just like any other layer. You can bring in FBX, OBJ, or Alembic files, access sub-nodes, add keyframes to any individual 3D asset, and animate the 3D camera. With Storyboard Pro, you can bring your animatic to life, regardless of whether your project is a 3D, 2D, live action, gaming, or hybrid production.
