Key Takeaways
- Procreate Dreams is a new app by Procreate specifically designed for iPad Pro users, offering a user-friendly but powerful animation tool.
- The app allows users to create 2D art and then animate it, with features similar to a video editor and dedicated tools for animation.
- Procreate Dreams takes advantage of Apple Silicon M1 and M2-powered iPads, offering GPU acceleration and the ability to import footage up to 8K resolution. It will be available on the App Store for a one-time fee of $19.99, without recurring monthly subscriptions.
When iPad first got Pencil support, Procreate was among the first apps to make the most of the smooth display and the advanced connected stylus, opening up a world of possibilities for digital artists on one of the most popular tablets in the world.
It's garnered fans the world over, and become one of the must-download creative apps for any aspiring artists. Now, the company is back with another app called Procreate Dreams, and it sounds pretty incredible - especially for anyone with an iPad Pro.
With Dreams, Procreate is attempting to do for animators what it did for digital painters and artists with its first app. It's delivering a user-friendly - but incredibly powerful - tool for anyone wanting to get to grips with animation.
Like Procreate, the Procreate Dreams app is designed exclusively for iPad, turning your iPad into a portable, lightweight animation studio or suite that you can take with you anywhere. Also, like Procreate, you can use quality painting and drawing tools to create 2D art but - unlike the first Procreate - you can then animate them.
In a lot of ways, it looks and works like a video editor, but with dedicated features for creating your own art and then animating it.
Using the Procreate Dreams timeline you can mix your animated drawings with video and edit audio and sound effects, and it's a user interface designed primarily for use with fingers and the Apple Pencil, not a fiddly keyboard and mouse combo.
For traditionalists who love old-school animation, there's a Flipbook mode which - as the name suggests - enables that flipbook style page-flicking animation.
As with any highly-capable creativity app, Procreate Dreams is designed to make the most of the Apple Silicon M1 and M2-powered iPads. Using GPU acceleration, you can make changes to your animation, and then immediately play them. No waiting for rendering is required.
It's not low-quality video render either - you can import footage up to 8K resolution, letting you crop in and create panning and motion without losing detail. And you can have multiple layers stacked, without losing speed and efficiency, or - at least - that's what Procreate's press release suggests.
All in all - if the promises during the launch hold true - it could be come the defacto app of choice for any 2D animators, or anyone looking to turn their still 2D pictures into moving ones. We're very excited to try it out when it's available.
Procreate Dreams will land on the App Store on 22 November, and - bucking modern trends - it will be available for a one-off $19.99 fee that lets you use the app with no recurring monthly subscriptions. You pay once, and that's it. It's yours to use.