I've tried seemingly every program there is, but Crazy Talk seems to make the most sense. I've tried Harmony and even purchased a couple of lessons at digital-tutors.com but OMG its such a steep learning curve! I"m glad I didn't actually go past the trial for that one. I was prepared to shell out huge $$ for it but it seems, for the life of me, I cannot learn it. So there's no use shelling out big $$ for that which I cannot learn. :/ Crazy talk seems to have a less horrid learning curve and you can make actual puppets that don't require a steady hand and cutting your characters up. That's what I like about it. I don't know if anybody here has even heard of it yet. It also lets you change heads and limbs and stuff for pre-drawn limbs/faces. Right now I'm just on the trial doing a few practice runs before I start on my trailer. I was curious if anyone else actually used it.
Animation : Anybody use crazy talk animation? by G.R. Barnett
Anybody use crazy talk animation?
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I have not, but I've looked at Anime Studio by SmithMicro a few times. Looking at some of their intro examples, and their capabilities, it seems like they're at about the same level, like easy integration for mocap and using 3D animations to control 2D characters. What I don't like is how "flat" the art is. I don't know if there's a way around that. I also don't like how they seem so jumbly like marionettes - I imagine there's some kind of algorithm you can run over at the end to smooth out some of the jangles along the way. But with that being said, Adobe's Character Animator can do a lot of the same stuff, but instead of doing mocap, you just use a webcam and have it use facial tracking on you as you speak. You can control the eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and expressions, as well as the shape of your mouth (which comes from analyzing your audio in real-time). If you already have a subscription to creative cloud, this might be good enough for you. You can use the mouse or keyboard maps to control limbs and stuff in characters too, and you can either use characters you download, or create your own in photoshop/illustrator layers for easy integration.
I had a version of anime studio that came with my tablet and honestly? I could not make sense of it, it was too steep of a learning curve for me. The flatness of the art was an issue for me too, in anime studio and that's why I like Crazy Talk so much better because it lets you import your own art and make it as realistic as you want it to be. You also have the option of importing backgrounds which is really awesome because that's an issue with me. Adobe character animator seems like a really great thing but I wish it wasn't mocap. :( I didn't know you could animate by using the mouse to control stuff, is that true? Because from what I read it was mocap only. For now I'll stick with Crazy Talk lol.
If you don't like the flatness of the art you could try Blender. It used to be free, I think and open source. I've seen some good stuff from it. Learning curve for computer animation is likely always to be steep. - JT
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For me it was the other way - I didn't get on with Crazy Talk but I found Anime Studio gave me what I wanted. I don't quite get the comments about "flatness"... it's dead easy in AS to add shadows behind or shading / highlights inside a character if that's what you mean. About the "jangles" Perry mentioned - the new version (AS11) has automatic curve smoothing which you can tune from "high" to "off" if you use the freehand tools -- but most people use the curve drawing tools (less intuitive at first, but once you get the hang of them and how to design for animation IMO they're streets ahead of anything else). And there's a very active and supportive user community http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/index.php