Building on, and launching from this reconceptualization of animation, Flash CS4 provides a set of additional tools that have both immediate implications for animators, and give a hint of things to come. Newly designed, CS4-themed expandable panels, and the default vertical Property inspector make good use of the space on wider monitors in today’s work environments. And the Flash tool set now more closely matches the tools in Illustrator and Photoshop.
#ADOBE FLASH CS4 PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL MOVIE#
Similarly, Illustrator symbols import automatically as easily animated movie clips. As was the case with Flash CS3, when you copy and paste Illustrator layer objects, the layers import along with the artwork. Like Illustrator or Photoshop, Flash CS4 allows you to isolate an object by showing and hiding layers. The Flash interface now so resembles that of Illustrator that I find myself sometimes referring to the stage as the artboard-Illustrator’s terminology for a drawing area. To return to the Dreamweaver analogy-the frames, keyframes, and ActionScript coding generated as you create an animation on the stage in Flash CS4 are all still editable the old-fashioned way, so users who are comfortable with these modes of defining and editing animation can still use them, with no loss of functionality, from previous versions of Flash. Tweak the path of the animation by editing the vector line that defines the animation’s motion. You can control an animation on the Flash CS4 stage. The resulting animation path can be edited on the stage like any vector path. You then drag the object on the stage to generate an animation path. And Flash automatically converts your object to a ready-to-animate symbol. When you Control-click on any object, the contextual menu allows you to generate a motion, or a shape tween (animation). Instead, you simply draw on the stage, as if you were designing an illustration on the Illustrator artboard. To create this kind of animation in Flash CS4, you no longer start by defining starting and ending frames, and inserting keyframes where the animation changes direction. The heart and soul of Flash-and this is more so in CS4-is moving animation (motion tweens). But these elements are now submerged beneath new intuitive and accessible tools.Īn analogy to Dreamweaver is helpful here: You can create complex HTML Web pages, and use pre-built Spry tools to create interactive elements without writing or even needing to know HTML, JavaScript, or CSS coding. Flash CS4 does not do away with the Timeline, frames, keyframes, and scripting. Now, a designer can create a complex animation without even knowing what a frame or a keyframe is. The change is profound-since the emergence of Flash from the Shockwave evolutionary tree, generating and editing animation has been rooted in defining frames (and in particular, pivotal frames called keyframes) in the Timeline, and enhancing them with ActionScripts.
This means that animation properties are now assigned to, and edited as graphic objects, rather than residing in the movie frame that hosts the object. Underlying the new look is a new logic and model for generating animation.Ĭentral to the transformation of Flash is the emergence of object-based animation.
The change is both functional and symbolic. The stage-Flash’s design surface-has been moved from the bottom to the top of the window, with the formerly dominant Timeline now dispatched to the bottom of the screen. The new Flash identity is immediately apparent in its new default layout. With its revamped animation logic, and substantial new animation tools, Flash has now evolved into a much more accessible environment for designers who are comfortable with Adobe design workhorse applications like Illustrator, Photoshop ( ), and InDesign ( ). Yes, draw animation-by shaping the path of an illustration the same way an artist would draw a vector path in Adobe Illustrator. With CS4, Flash has finally turned the corner from a code-based authoring tool with an interactive animation element, to a designer-friendly space for illustrators to intuitively draw animation. Adobe Flash CS4 has been radically redesigned and restructured.