Anime Studio 8 Debut is software developed by Smith Micro Software. It is one of the versions that were released under the Anime Studio line. It is vector-based software in 2D animation. The software was made available for Macintosh and Windows Operating Systems. It supports different languages such as English, Japanese and German. One of its main features is the supporting of auto lip synching that works by importing a sound and have it added automatically to a mouth of one of the characters which in turn will give moving capabilities to the mouth and will look like as if the character is talking. The tools that are incorporated with this software are scriptable using Lua. Anime Studio 8 was written in Carbon, C++ and Cocoa. Some of the advanced features included in the package are Smart Bones, Bezier handles and Editable Motion Graphs among the others.
Before Anime Studio came to be known as a product of Smith Micro Software, the Lost Marble team led by Mike Clifton used to call it Moho and e-frontier was its distributor. Since late 2007, Smith Micro has distributed the software as a vector-based 2D animation tool capable of creating anime-like characters and props. It includes the GPL software Papagayo that's used to more accurately synchronize the movements of a character's mouth with the words in the script. The seventh version of Anime Studio already had a Physics engine and a 3D facility. By June 2011, it was upgraded to Anime Studio Pro 8, which imports layered Photoshop files and allows future edits in the PSD file to also appear in the imported copy. Features in Photoshop, like blending, smart objects, and opacity adjustment, are supported by this version. Major changes in version 8.1 include more 3D graphics through Poser 9 SDK and compatibility with the Multi-touch Wacom Bamboo tablets.