Animation technology

What do most studios use for modern anime?  Most series now use animation quality that would have previously been reserved for OAVs or movies.  Series such as Azumanga Daioh and Excel Saga use very fluid animation, even when a limited number of frames are used.  Movies have even more animation, sometimes nearly every frame has some kind of movement (compare the 5 minute Azumanga Daioh movie quality short to the series).  What do studios use to create this level of movement and fluidity in series or movies?   

The difference is that every commercial studio has now moved over to digital ink and paint, dispensing with the need for rows and rows of people painting each cel by hand, the need for painstaking rostrum camerawork to shoot the scenes, the need for expensive film cameras and film processing, the need to completely reshoot a scene if an error or change is made, and a whole host of other costly procedures. By going fully digital, a lot of money is saved on the ink and paint and post-production stages, money that can be spent on hiring more animators to allow more detailed frames, more frames per scene and so on. While those money-saving tricks like static holds, background pans, talking heads and so on are still in use, we see them somewhat less now. Oddly enough, Japanese and Korean studios were among the last to take up digital ink and paint technology, but it's here to stay now. Can you imagine how much money is saved when a single cel that would have taken fifteen minutes or more to paint can now be done in less than a minute on the computer? Or how costly reshoots have been eliminated when you can check and correct errors when they occur? Complicated visual effects like glowing stuff, translucent stuff, colour fades, etc. that would have required multiple passes on film cameras can now be applied in seconds and tweaked to perfection just as easily.

Now, the fluidity of animation is greatly dependent on how many frames per second are actually animated. Anime, like all film, is shot at nearly 24 frames per second. Big-budget feature films can afford to pay animators to sit and draw 24 individual frames for every second of action on screen, but TV series and OVA series have smaller budgets, so cannot afford this expense. Typically, they will have the animators draw only every other frame, or every third frame. This is known as "shooting on twos" or "shooting on threes". Doing this means you've basically halved or thirded the number of drawings required, greatly reducing the animation costs. You can't go much below shooting on threes, since below 8-10 frames per second the illusion of motion falls apart (not that that has stopped some studios, anime studios in particular - ever see scenes where they basically dissolve from one frame to the next? You can get away with two frames per second there!).

TV animation cuts other corners by not drawing the entire character for every frame. In high-quality (usually film) animation, a la Disney, the animators will draw the entire character for every frame, so you can keep the motion very fluid and realistic by keeping the character moving, gesticulating, moving their head, etc. Naturally, this takes a long time to draw, so TV animation tends to split characters into two or more layers. A scene where a character is talking might have their body and head on one cel layer, with their mouth on another layer on top. The mouth is quick to draw, so can be changed quickly (and you'll notice a lot of talking anime mouths often only have three or so positions - open, half open, closed). The body/head layer need not be changed every frame, only on frames where the character needs to perform a movement broader than just opening and closing their mouths. On a related note, anime studios very rarely bother to do accurate lip-synch, and recording the voices before the animation is done, standard procedure in even the cheapest of American productions, is practically unheard-of in Japanese animation.

Anime has always been about getting a balance between detail and movement, while still keeping the cost down. Modern technology just means the same amount of money goes a lot further and can be seen right up there on screen.

What kind of software do they use?  I've heard of something like SoftImage.

I can't vouch for Japan in general, but SoftImage is one of the industry standards for digital ink and paint (for example, Ghibli uses Softimage Toonz for I&P, and Softimage 3D for (surprise) 3D). Cambridge Animo and USAnimation Toon Boom are other common packages. Some of the larger studios around the world use custom-developed systems (Disney's CAPS and Deep Canvas systems, for example, or in the 3D world, Pixar's Marionette/Renderman suite), but there is room in most studio's software repetoire for even common prosumer-level applications like Flash and Photoshop.

Most anime studio use the Japanese company CELSYS's RETAS Pro., which is perfectly optimized to Japanese 2D anime production flow.
RETAS standard edition is also popular amoung amateur animaters.

Most anime studio use the Japanese company CELSYS's RETAS Pro., which is perfectly optimized to Japanese 2D anime production flow.
RETAS standard edition is also popular amoung amateur animaters.

That, and cheap Korean labor.  Check the credits for some shows, and you'll seen tons of Korean names (spelled out in roman characters).