Michiel . van Vlaardingen

These last few days I needed to create an animation, but most obvious tools don’t work for Linux. I just needed something simple for 2D animation. Initially just changing the transparency on a few images and  zooming/panning/clipping it a bit while doing that.

I quickly encountered Synfig, it was a bit overkill, but also triggered my imagination and an immediate desire to play with it. The user-interface is a bit typical. It reminds somewhat of early versions of Macromedia Director, without the interactive tools.  You are wise to read the manuals and tutorials, because it does not speak for itself. However it does provide a very complete set of tools to create animation and I had something resembling what I wanted quite quickly.

As I used Synfig to create the seperate scenes, I now needed something to compile it together into a video.  The ‘Pitivi’ editor did not work as expected and after some searching I ended up picking Kdenlive. I think it looks amazing.  The user-interface looks nice and has everything you expect from it:  title screens, adding audio,  effects, transitions and various rendering options.

Using these tools video editing and 2D animation is very well possible on an open-source platform.

P.S. I also encountered Freesound.org which seems to have a very large database of creative-commons licensed sounds. I still have to try that though.