Create animations & flash contents with ease.
Macromedia Flash 5 is the key to designing and delivering low-bandwidth animations, presentations, and Web sites. It offers scripting capabilities and server-side connectivity for creating engaging applications, Web interfaces, and training courses. Once you've created your content, 96% of the online audience will be able to view it with the Macromedia Flash Player.
Macromedia Flash—and its namesake file format—redefined the Internet browsing experience five years ago with scalable vector animations. Of the products in our roundup, Macromedia Flash 5 is the most difficult to learn, but because it also has the most power—and is the only reviewed product with internal scripting—it's the obvious choice for high-end developers who want to build true Flash applications.
ActionScript, Flash's scripting language, can drive simple cues and navigation controls and includes conditional logic, variable evaluation, and live text input fields for Web application development. Macromedia provides an expert input mode and debugger for users who feel comfortable working with ActionScript. For the less experienced, Flash 5 includes several aids, such as a point-and-click palette that lets you build ActionScript statements and predefined routines called SmartClips. Flash ships with a small sampling of SmartClips, and you can download several more free at Macromedia's site.
Like many of the other products in our roundup, Flash has a workspace that includes a composition window (a stage), a timeline, a toolbox, and myriad floating palettes in which you set object attributes. You organize a movie using discrete object layers and scenes.
Flash 5 introduces drawing tools familiar to graphic artists, namely a Bezier pen and curve editing, but the program employs an unconventional drawing and painting paradigm for vector objects. Fills and strokes, for example, are treated as separate objects. When you place multiple objects on the same layer, objects higher in the stack replace portions of the objects they overlap; removing the objects at the forefront leaves blank space. The drawing mechanisms improve download performance by creating the smallest possible images, but they can be confusing to artists accustomed to an object-oriented drawing environment, such as those found in Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand.
Automated tweening is also a bit different from what we found in the other applications we reviewed. Flash 5 automatically converts objects to symbols when you use the Motion Tween command. You can then insert keyframes and generate the intermediate frames. Symbols, which are stored in a library, reduce the final file size of a movie, because they download only once, even when they appear on different frames and in different positions within a movie. When you edit the master symbol, all instances of the symbol will update throughout a project.
Flash 5 imports many vector and raster formats and is conveniently synergistic with Macromedia FreeHand. Flash 5 preserves FreeHand layers, interprets individual pages as scenes, and converts objects to symbols, making compositions a snap to animate. You can also launch Macromedia Fireworks from within Flash 5 to edit raster images. We found that Flash does an excellent job of syncing sounds to events in a movie. You can use keyframes to start or stop audio playback, and you can apply panning and volume envelopes to a sound file.
When it's time to publish your movie, you'll find that Flash provides more output options than other programs. In addition to a SWF file with a handy HTML container, Flash 5 lets you export video. And like its sibling program, Macromedia Director, Flash can generate a projector, which is a standalone EXE file that contains and plays the movie.
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