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At 5/10/14 08:54 PM, Kixen wrote: So there are Wintab drivers available for the Microsoft surface, does this make it a liable drawing tablet? It'd be nice to animate wherever, plus a Surface Pro is roughly $500 USD while a Wacom 13HD is around $1000, would it be something decent to use?

It works good enough. I had a Samsung slate for a while, pretty much the same specs. The pressure sensitivity is good but it's a tiny screen to work on. I'd recommend getting a second hand Cintiq over a Surface personally. They're way better if you get a decent sized one and I honestly think touchscreens are more of a pain than they're worth. You need a keyboard if you want to do any real animating because there are several keys missing from the windows on-screen keyboard so the only real advantage is using the touch for zoom and rotate and a lot of animation programs (including Adobe software) don't support this feature and will glitch out hardcore. Also 90% of the time any buttons aretoo small for your fat hand to press so you have to always be using the stylus anyway. I've seen old 21UX's from as low as $500. I have a Cintiq Companion which is the same size as a 13HD, I used to have a 24HD which I had to sell unfortunately and if I could get another one I would.

I've got a CC subscription. I can only animate in Flash, I have no other skills, I can't action script or movie tween etc. I use Photoshop for backgrounds and After Effects for camera moves and vfx. Up until now I was perfectly happy with Flash regardless of the version. Every time they upgraded I didn't care coz it never effects me, then the brush tool stopped working! WTF! The only thing I use in Flash, except for the fill tool and the transform tool (they still work fine) but the f*cking brush tool!!! Come on man! Then they fix it, but it's not the same! I can't work out why? My lines look like they have a rare skin disease up until 40% smoothing but at that level I have almost no control over the line weight at all! I bought Toonboom Animate 3 coz it was on special and it's brush tool works fine, but it just doesn't feel right, plus the interface is butt ugly. I guess it's cool they fixed the bugs and all that plus now it opens super fast but all I want is a working brush tool! Also it does this weird thing where it freezes every five minutes or so (not auto-save). I don't rate it very high.

At 10/12/13 09:40 PM, SwedishPlumTrees wrote: Hi y'all. So I was wondering how people go about freelance work? Where exactly do you find the jobs? I don't really have many connections (or any) since I'm in my first year of college, but I'd like to at least see if I could do it. And also to even see if I could do animation under pressure and with direction from someone else. Any help is appreciated.

I know how you feel mate! I was in the same boat a few years ago. Answer is, I am still struggling to find freelance work (paid stuff anyway). All my freelance work has been through cafes I've worked at or friends. Otherwise through grants, they don't pay well but some pay is better than no pay. My mentor from the last grant funded project I made is pretty good at freelancing though. He has years of experience working for animation companies so through that he has built up a bit of a rep. He is also just generally awesome at animating and does everything the hardest way possible but the end result is amazing. He just gets work through word of mouth and people stumbling across his website. He doesn't market himself or anything anymore, or at least that's what he tells me. Check out his website, it might give you some ideas http://www.mechanicalapple.com/

I am trying to upload a video for the first time on Newgrounds and it's not working! I've tried twice now and each time I start uploading in the morning and come home in the evening after work to find it still loading the file. The upload only takes around an hour as I have monitored the data sent from my computer but then it seems to be taking forever to encode the file or whatever it has to do. Is this normal? The file is an h264 .mp4 file. Could this be the cause of my problem. From what I have read .mp4 should be fine! Help!