I believe I can give you a pretty accurate review of Dudley through the eyes of an expert. I’ve worked with online animation tools for more than 10 years now, first in my own animation agency and now as a course creator, and I’ve created hundreds of animation videos for clients, course students, and this YouTube channel. I’ve bought Dudley Standard, and in this video we’ll put Dudley to the test. We’ll talk about functionality, price, interface, libraries, and workflow at the end of this video.
You’ll know how good dudely really is as an animation tool, how to use it in the best way, and if it’s worth your money. Let’s dive in.
Dudley is a super popular animation maker focused around the whiteboard format, a format that looks like it’s hand drawn, but really it’s just an animated hand with a programmed drawing path. Many tools can do this videoscribe beyond animaker, but I believe there are a couple of reasons why Dudley is becoming such a popular whiteboard animation.
Cool.
Dudley is only $39.00 a month, which makes it more accessible than premium animation makers like Beyoncé at $89.00 for the No Watermark HD export plan. Price is a huge consideration when I read through the different threads on what whiteboard tool to choose, probably because a lot of its users are solo freelancers or upcoming content creators with a limited budget. As with so many other things, you get what you pay for with Dudley, you don’t pay a premium.
Guys, for a premium tool you pay a fair price for a fair tool and I think the relation between quality and price is decent.
I haven’t seen this in any other tool than Dudley the option to import your own images and create a custom drawing path for it. How it works is that you tell Dudley what path to follow by adding control points around the edges of whatever image you imported. After you’ve done this, it look like your imported image comes from the Dudley Universe because it looks like it’s being drawn like all the other assets instead of the standard scraping effect that is your.
Only solution with all other tools on top of this very cool feature. The standard drawing paths look amazing too. Super precise and very captivating to watch.
Dudly automatically aligns the durations of your drawings to the length of your scene. If you drag, it doodly assigns extra time to each element, so there’s always something to look at. The tool also extends the length of a scene if you want to allocate extra time to one of your more detailed drawings. This is a huge help and time saver if you aim to keep the pen alive, as I talk about in my video on how to make better whiteboard videos.
If you have a slow connection, the option to work offline is going to be huge for you. I know how important it is to have a fast Internet connection to make online animation makers work smoothly in. Dudly, you need Internet to save your projects of course, but the doodly interface works really well when I turn off my Internet connection. This means that you can create an entire video in offline mode, then find an Internet connection.
You save your project, important to a lot of people living in rural areas.
There are a lot of positive things to say about doodling, but it also has its shortcomings. Of course, no tool is perfect, and these are some of the drawbacks that I think you should know about before you choose your whiteboard animation tool.
If you don’t upgrade to the more expensive plan, you don’t buy extra add-ons from the marketplace, and you don’t buy totally rainbow, you’re left with a limited number of assets to work with.
There is certainly enough to build your stories with if you are a bit creative with your choices, but I think the standard libraries lack contemporary assets when I try to search for them, and that’s a limitation I also encountered with tunley made by the same company. They want you to upgrade and that is something they will prompt you to do constantly.
When I make my videos, my process is that I start with the scripts, then I narrate it as a voiceover, and lastly I make the animations. This workflow doesn’t work that well with Dudley because it’s difficult to time your voice to your visuals accurately when the timing of the animations aren’t shown in the timeline. How do I synchronize the voice and the visuals? So when I say something specific, a word or a sentence, what is set?
Is also shown in order to do that in DOODLY trial and error is the only way. That’s why I’d recommend starting with the visuals. If you want to use doodly, then record your voice over on top afterwards.
This breaks heavily with the process I promote in my course. Powerful process, so I would have a hard time adapting to this reverse process.
It really does feel like doodle is made for Windows users and not for Mac users. The application for Mac works fine, that’s not it. What makes me think of my young days as a Windows user is the double click and the double confirmation. Want to add something to a scene? Double click. Want to delete something? Double confirmation that that is actually what you intend to do.
In the long run, this becomes quite annoying if you’re used to work on a Mac or in a more premium animation tool. A small thing, I know, but everything counts.
The drawing paths that are programmed for even the most hand friendly fonts are really rough.
I just praised the precise drawing paths that are made for props and characters, so it’s a little sad to see how little love the texts have gotten. The pen is supposed to follow each letters lines and it doesn’t do that very well when it comes to texts. A real shame.
So how good is Dudley as an animation tool? Well, pretty good if you only want to create whiteboard videos. It’s not a full-fledged animation maker with lots of effects, actions and big libraries. But for simple whiteboard videos, Dudley is a good choice at a reasonable price point. You’ll get the most out of duty if you stick to designing scenes that contain a few pros.