Studio Artist has a wide set of different animation features that span the complete range of generating fully automatic auto-rotoscoped paint animation from source video footage to traditional hand painted animation. As well as various keyframing features that would sit somewhere in the middle of the continuum of fully automatic to fully manual animation approaches.
David Kaplan's Sundance film festival award winning feature length animated film 'Year of the Fish' was done entirely using Studio Artist. He actually used an inexpensive dv camcorder to film the original footage due to the low budget he needed to work with to pull off making his film, and then was able to create larger resolution full HD paint animated output for his final feature film release.
http://www.synthetik-studioartist.com/search/label/david%20kaplan
Sharon Katz is an animator who works very traditionally, hand drawing individual frames to build up an animated film frame by frame. She's been one of our beta testers for many years. She uses Studio Artist's movie layer features to do that.
http://www.synthetik.com/tips/tag/movie-layer/
Sharon is a member of the studio artist user forum, and would be open to questions from you i'm sure.
http://studioartist.ning.com/profile/SharonKatz?xg_source=profiles_memberList
Here's a tutorial she put together on animating using studio artist, which might help answer some of your hand animation questions.
http://www.awn.com/blog/animating-synthetik-studioartist
David used Studio Artist's auto-rotoscoping features for making his film. So he starts with video source footage, works with one frame of that footage to build up an artistic effect, and then studio artist intelligently paints the rest of the frames in that artistic style.
Sharon works at the other end of the spectrum, hand painting each frame, building up her animation from scratch by hand. She does this in movie layers. A movie layer allows you to load a movie into the studio artist canvas. You can then paint on top of individual movie frames, or add new ones frame by frame.
Nina Paley (another famous animator and one of our earliest users) used Studio Artist as one of the software tools she used for putting together an imax resolution animated film.
http://www.synthetik-studioartist.com/search?q=paley
Studio Artist is also capable of what we call generative animation. So this could be mathematical forms or textures or geometric forms that self animate over time. Or you can keyframe animate them if you wish.
You can also keyframe animate individual paint strokes in our paint action sequencer timeline. So this would be another way to build up hand painted animation, where you could concentrate on painting in keyframes and then let studio artist do the tween work to render the animation frames between the recorded keyframes. We have a special feature called sequential keyframe recording to aid in this process.
http://www.synthetik.com/tips/2010/07/sequential-keyframe-recording/
We also have more advanced features where you can take a complete painting, or series of paintings, break them down into individual bezier paint strokes, and then automatically generate movement between the individual paintings. An entire paintings worth of bezier paths can be encapsulated into a single auto-paint step. And you could be using multiple ones with different paint characteristics in a paint action sequence.
http://www.synthetik.com/tips/2009/05/encapsulated-bezier-keyframe-paint-animation/
I hope this helps to quickly explain all of the amazing animation features available within Studio Artist. If you have any additional question, please feel free to ask here. Or check out the Studio Artist User Forum .