Hi,

I'm looking for an animation tool to fill a specific need described below.
According to what you know from your software, do you think I can easily do that kind of animations with it?
If well, I'll be glad to spend some time trying it, and any indication on how to do will be welcome.

Thank you very much for your answer.
Kind regards.

Need Description
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I've large diagrams. Too large for a screen. When it fits the screen, the text is too small to be read. It's made with Adobe Illustrator and usually printed on large A3 paper.

I'd like to do small movies/animations that explain the diagram to students.
We usually first show the whole (unreadable) diagram to students. Then we zoom in to a small area, and we stop (explaining something). We move the camera, maybe zooming out a little bit to show another part of the diagram. We stop and explain (voice). And so on.
While we explain, we make some boxes or arrows appear (to be created with your animation tool) to emphasis a line of text or any element of the diagram. When we "move/zoom the camera", these boxes and arrows must move/zoom along as if they where printed on the diagram.

I'm ok if the diagram is exported as a 300dpi bitmap from illustrator, and is considered as one big (4626 x 3300 pixels) flat bitmap image in your tool . It'll probably be difficult to import the adobe illustrator diagram or a pdf version into your animation tool and keep it vectorial.

The typical length of such an animation ranges from 1 to 10 minutes.

The last requirement I have is to enable the students viewing the animation, to control the time execution. For example, making a pause is a must. For example, they use the pause button because our explanation is too fast. They must be able to go a little bit backward and forward. I'm ok if your software can export a good resolution (bitmap) movie (1024 x something) of the animation. Movie players have the needed pause/fw/bw buttons.

John Rizzo
JavaBlackBelt.com