For the beginner, opening up Viscosity may be a little intimidating. Punching up a new file, you have the option of creating a bitmap or animation. That's right, an animation. This program allows you to work frame by frame creating scenes and then slice and dice them and insert all types of transitions to create whatever type of animation you'd like. You can also use the program like an advanced paint studio where you can draw very advanced artwork for use in multimedia and web development, or import pictures and use Viscosity to edit them with a variety of filters and effects.
Viscosity is a downloadable program and comes with little documentation.
This weakness is nicely compensated by an excellent tutorial section on Sonic Foundry's website. With over 50 tutorials showing you how to work with animations and apply a wide variety of effects, you'll be up to speed in no time. The variety of the tutorials is excellent, though at times imperfect. A spotlight should appear. When the spotlight didn't appear, I became confused and wound up skipping the step with no apparent consequence of doing so.