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My CS4 Fave: Flash Animation Redone!
Happy Wednesday everyone. I bet you guys are still reeling with all of the cool stuff that there is out there on the Creative Suite 4. I’ve got to tell you, there are a bunch of new features out there that have me completely excited – I figure I’ll talk about some of them in the upcoming posts. Let’s start with Flash!
If there’s one program that has taken a big change from its normal operating procedure, it’s Flash. Actionscript 3.0 was a substantial departure from its earlier scripting ilk, but that would prove to be nothing compared to the changes in animation for Flash CS4.
Here’s the deal on Animation. To make an animation, you needed to make a keyframe of a symbol, place it in a new location, then go back and animate the tween of the two symbols (a “Tween” is what happens from an animating standpoint beTween two symbols). There were a couple things that were annoying about this:
Unnecessary steps in making the tween animation.
Very limited easing available
Moving the whole Tween required a bunch of steps to do
Motion guides required an engineering degree to setup
Now, there are many other things that bugged me, but I wont go into it. Enter Flash CS4. The Motion Tweening on this tool is AWESOME! Right click the symbol and tween. Now you can move the symbol wherever you want. The tween automatically has a motion guide setup as a bezier path that you can change. Easing is built it, but a motion editor panel gives you pinpoint control of the animation as a whole – it actually looks a little After Effects-ish.
This is going to open the door for a bunch of cool animations. But hey, don’t take my word for it.
Check out David Stiller’s Video on Flash CS4 Motion Tweening
Visitor Comments »
Comment by Paul Martin | September 24, 2008 @ 2:50 pm
I subscribed to a hard copy of your magazine but I have not received an edition of the magazine as yet. Please advise…
Lynn Kielley
Rogers TV
Comment by Lynn Kielley | September 25, 2008 @ 7:29 am
This sounds absolutely fantastic. I cannot wait to get my hands on CS4. My company has been teetering around the idea of incorporating some awesome flash into our website, but we simply lack the flash manpower/expertise to spend months building a couple of mediocre videos. It sounds like this new version of Flash, will help us to create more stunning video than we had anticipated, and in less time! Fantastic!
Comment by DeAndrea Laub | September 25, 2008 @ 12:05 pm
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