Hello,

I'm trying to learn animation for the purpose of generating functional demonstrations of our products as well as installation videos for our marketing department. Solidworks Visualize has been pretty great for still imagery and animations involving only camera movement. After a conversation with our VAR, it appears Visualize has major issues with keyframing in visualize itself which have eliminated our ability to animate in Visualize (See opacity glitches in attached animation).

As a result, I'm trying to animate in Solidworks and then import into Visualize. Part of the struggle I'm having are expected, but I get more and more of the impression that Solidworks isn't designed to produce polished and realistic animations with regard to camera and component movements. At this point, I'm considering looking for another animating & rendering platform like Blender, 3Ds Max, or Cinema 4D that is more designed for this purpose and perhaps is more mature. Is anyone having similar struggles? Any tips to help salvage my hope of using solidworks animations for this kind of end-use or a good direction forward would be appreciated. Still imagery remains decent, but I've been greatly disappointed with its animating capabilities. 

Issues I'm wresting with:

• Uploading motion studies to Visualize aren't very stable. I've had frequent loss of keyframes.
• Updating a motion assembly and merging in Visualize remains prone to errors. At this point, the benefit of Visualize over other rendering platforms is fairly minimized with this issue, especially with workflows where minute changes are frequent and force you to do a lot of rework
• Merging animated appearance changes in SW with Visualize is not efficient or very effective 
• You can't change or polish keyframes in Visualize once imported and there is very minimal keyframing options and no customization in SW. How can we make a high quality, realistic animation in Visualize if our model looks great, but our object movements look so unpolished?

Example of the kind of cinematography and quality we are trying to achieve: ODL - Brisa Single Door Installation - YouTube 

Thank you for your time.