My use-cases are primarily:
1) To be able to compose & prototype different parts of NES animation effects for my own workflow. i.e., if I start with some sprite animations or some background animations already prototyped separately (or maybe just existing as concept art) then I'd like a quick way to combine all of this into a multi-layered animation and/or longer cutscene for a preview of how it might look, before trying to combine it all with 6502 code.
Note that I'm not really looking for a program to create the actual sprites / background animation frames, but to compose such animations into longer cutscenes, and animate moving objects independently. A 2d animation program sounds ideal for this.
2) The secondary goal is to get a feeling for what UI an artist would excepts from contemporary 2d animation software, for a little project of mine to simplify the process of making such composed animations for the NES. Although there's only so many programs I'll have time to dig deeper into.
Ideally it would also be a 2d animation program that doesn't have to be beaten with a too big stick to show / snap-to the 256x240 grid the final result on the NES will ultimately be limited to - whilst still allowing me to diverge from the grid for concept art.
I've tried OpenToonz so far, and with its massive configurability it seemed very promising for being an open-source tool. Supposedly used by Studio Ghibli too.
But loading any animations (exported either from Pro Motion or from a NES emulator) in OpenToonz is a PITA, as it's quickly become a case of pick-your-poison:
A) Loading a sprite / background animation saved to an .avi file makes OpenToonz crash in a image library dll as soon as you try to reposition it
B) Loading the original png screenshots as a single image sequence doesn't crash OpenToonz... but doing any operation (such as just repositioning it) now causes a 10-minute delay before the software becomes responsive again. So it looks like there's a way-too-high performance cost to this option.
So in either case OpenToonz now looks like a no-starter. Curious how Studio Ghibli managed to work around all this in their awesome movie productions. Perhaps the program was more reliable before going down the road of open-source...
I'm willing to consider commercial paid-for-software, as long as it is reasonably priced and doesn't require a subscription model, as I plan to work on this irregularly and have no plans to become an full-time 2d animator. I just want to have a quick-n-easy way to compose my programmer art, composing pre-made animations using a timeline or similar GUI.
So I'm really looking for something that has a short learning curve, but is still flexible enough to not make replicating pixel-art difficult... and is moderately representative of how most 2d animation programs behave in these days. And most of all... stable enough not to constantly crash or hang for several minutes.
