The All New Procreate Dreams App Could Be The Best Reason To Buy An iPad For Animation

Australian developer Savage Interactive is hoping its new app, Procreate Dreams, does for animation what its original Procreate app did for digital painting. The latter app, which launched in 2011, has been the best-selling iPad app for over six years and has twice won the Apple Design Award. The company is boasting that the new iPadOS app, available November 22, will be an all-in-one program for the next generation of animators, "packed with everything you need to bring your art and stories to life."

Procreate Dreams will support the hundreds of brushes offered by the original Procreate App, which are specifically designed to be used by the Apple Pencil and its precise, low-latency compatibility with the iPad and iPad Pro. The software is also built to be touch-based, unlike typical keyboard-and-mouse programs made for PCs and Macs. Rather than setting up complex keyframes, paths, and other standard animation tools, Procreate Dreams will use intuitive gestures and taps and record the user's actions as they make them in order to create real-time "performances." Frame-by-frame flipbook-style animations will also be possible.

Features include the ability to import ProRes footage up to 8K, as well as custom fonts for titles, credits, and other text. A new audio engine will allow users to easily add voiceover, dialogue, music, sound effects, and more. Video can be drawn over with additional layers to easily annotate or rotoscope what's on screen. Additionally, users can perform non-destructive edits, such as applying filters, tweaking movement, adjusting blurs, and altering colors.

With the latest iPad Pro powered by the M2 chip, Procreate Dreams can take advantage of Apple Silicon's high-performance hardware. The engine powering the app can allow artists to work on raster projects with as many layers as they need, with a resolution of up to one million by one million pixels.

The heart of the app is its Multi-touch Timeline, similar in structure to the digital editing timelines of other apps like Adobe Premiere and iMovie, but built completely around touch-based controls. The Multi-touch Timeline will bring together all the major steps of animating a movie, including drawing, keyframing, cel animation, compositing, and video editing. Professional animators will be able to exploit everything Procreate Dreams has to offer to bring their art to life with remarkable speed, but even beginner artists will be able to take advantage of the app's simple, intuitive design.

According to Savage Interactive, Procreate Dreams will be able to render in real-time, allowing users to instantly watch edits to their animation play out. Even files as big as a terabyte can open just as quickly, with zero loading time. Saving and exporting timelines will be just as instantaneous, and files are designed for iCloud synchronization and will have unlimited undo history so that no changes are ever permanently destructive.

While other graphic design and productivity apps have been shifting to a subscription model, Procreate Dreams will be available as a one-time purchase on the App Store for $19.99.