Hey all, starting on animation for the first time and need help nailing down my process. I'm aiming for an animation style 
similar to Another World (somewhat rotoscoped vectors).
I made a first pass
 and have thoughts on what the next iteration would change (mostly 
reducing the number of verts and fixing the jitter/gaps), but wanted 
some feedback on my process.
I'm currently rotoscoping by taking 
video, cutting it down into the frames I want in Premiere, then pulling 
those into Illustrator and tracing them on layers. This makes it tough 
to see how the animation is coming along, since I need to export the 
layers out to an swf if I want to see it in motion. The eventual output 
that I want is a bunch of pngs that I'll either pack or import straight 
into UE4.
I'm also having a hard time keeping the overall motions
 in my head while I'm working. I'm focusing on lining up to the 
reference, and end up losing my sense of how things are moving in a 
given frame. This is certainly because of my lack of experience, but I 
think that the lack of playback and the roto process in general might be
 contributing to it.
So, my questions. 
1. Is there a better 
tool for what I'm doing? I looked around and found better tools for 
animation, but couldn't find any that supported point-based vectors.
2.
 Should I drop the roto and just use the videos as reference instead? 
The Another World dev said that he didn't actually use roto much, since 
hand-animating got better results. I can't tell if it feels bad because 
I'm bad, or because it's not the best process for what I want.
 
            
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