Is it just me or does Flash really suck?

[fluffy]

So I've only recently started animating (which I've wanted to do for years), and of course being a child of the computer age I've been using Flash for all of it. Is Flash really the easiest way to animate on a computer? I guess I've been spoiled by how good the state of video and audio editing apps are.

First of all, Flash's model is so wacky. You have a master timeline with no real way of doing hierarchical "blocks" (except scenes, but if you do that you can't have elements which span multiple scenes - plus, how can you rearrange scenes afterwards? It seems that you have to create them in order). Okay, there's also movie clips, but when you use those, you can't actually see them in action until you've exported the movie, and good luck trying to synchronize them to everything else. And then its layers are all like "hey let's separate everything into separate layers since that's the only way to keep shapes separate, except hey let's make it so that editing operations sometimes affect everything the cursor touches! Oh you didn't want to change the background layer? TOO BAD, YOU FORGOT TO LOCK IT."

Next, it's buggy as hell. Motion tweens don't seem to work consistently - SOMETIMES you can move and rotate, SOMETIMES you can just move, sometimes if you move and then later add a rotation without making any other modification the move gets completely jacked-up. And then when you try exporting the movie to Quicktime so you can, say, bring it into Final Cut to composite it with another video, good luck actually getting a decent result - since it tries doing everything in realtime and just treats Quicktime as some sort of live video tape, all sorts of things can mess up (if you buffer to memory you get weird artifacts where parts of the image don't get updated, if you buffer to disk then the framerate sucks). I'd just composite it in Flash except I'm working at 720p and so that leads to all sorts of other problems (related to the framerate/speed issues).

Then there's some things where it just doesn't even TRY. Shape tweens make absolutely no sense. Change even one vertex location on either end and suddenly the whole tween just does this really weird thing where it doesn't even try to interpolate the shapes in any reasonable way. Even the fill and the outline get interpolated completely differently. My day job is as a graphics programmer so I know that doing good automatic shape tweening is difficult, but this isn't even mediocre shape tweening, this is crap.

If it makes a difference, this is on CS3. I also have MX (which I bought years ago when I didn't have the patience to learn this), which might work better. Is it worth downgrading? If I do, will my CS3-authored animations at least load in MX? (I'm not using anything fancy, or at least nothing that would be considered fancy in the video editing world, though I guess that doesn't necessarily map well.) I see CS3 only gives the option to save in CS3 and 8... is there any way to convert it to MX, aside from also getting version 8 and using that to 'save as' in MX format?

I think in the future I'll just draw everything in Photoshop and composite/move it in Final Cut, which actually has a semblance of a decent model (unfortunately its workflow and motion etc. is intended for video and motion graphics, not for animation, but that should still be a hell of a lot easier to deal with than Flash).

[jimmortensen]

"plus, how can you rearrange scenes afterwards? It seems that you have to create them in order."
window -> other panel -> scene

"Okay, there's also movie clips, but when you use those, you can't actually see them in action until you've exported the movie"
Use graphics. Set them to "Play once".

CS3 is much better than an MX from an animation standpoint.

All your issues (except the Quicktime Export one. It's buggy as hell. Use AE CS3 to compose your SWFs) have solutions. It just takes a bit of massaging, learning how Flash works.

[fluffy]

Okay, I didn't know graphics could hold multiple frames. I'll try that, thanks. And then that would solve the export issue, too, because then I can export it as a PNG sequence (and import that into Final Cut), so I don't have to buy yet another expensive piece of software for one function that I already have.

Still, from the standpoint of someone who's done a lot of video and music production, Flash's UI and timeline management seem downright primitive. I know it's *possible* to do all the things you can do with a block-editing tool (by selecting blocks of frames) but it's so incredibly crufty and gimpy.

Also, what about my tweening problems? One example of where it fails miserably: I'll have two layers which I want to apply the same motion to, and so I select the same frames on the same layers and do the exact same transform to both of them, then I add the motion tween, and on one layer the tween will work perfectly, and on the other layer it'll go completely weird until it hits the keyframe. (For example, my cat's head will fly off.) And is there a way to at least hint to Flash how to tween two shapes for a shape tween? It seems like the only shape tweens which come even close to reasonable are if it's the exact same shape and it's just changing color or alpha (and even then, sometimes the generated tween will be something ridiculous like the shape flipping over). There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Obviously I'm still learning the app but it seems like there could be a much better way for things to work. Again, I'm spoiled by the nice, polished, CONSISTENT user interfaces of Logic and Final Cut, and even Photoshop (it's obvious that Adobe's insisted on ex-Macromedia making their UI look like an Adobe UI without actually making it perform like one, though honestly I think Photoshop CS3 is a huge step backwards from CS1 as well).

[jimmortensen]

"Also, what about my tweening problems? One example of where it fails miserably: I'll have two layers which I want to apply the same motion to, and so I select the same frames on the same layers and do the exact same transform to both of them, then I add the motion tween, and on one layer the tween will work perfectly, and on the other layer it'll go completely weird until it hits the keyframe. (For example, my cat's head will fly off.) "
Make sure you haven't adjusted the transformation points. Or if you have, go to each keyframe (of the tween that is messing up), right-click on the symbol in the stage and select"Reset Transformation Point".

"And is there a way to at least hint to Flash how to tween two shapes for a shape tween?"
Select the shape in the beginning keyframe, and got to Modify -> Shape -> Add Shape Hint.

"There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it."
There is somewhat. Check the Help guide for hints on achieving the best Shape Tweens.

I'm not defending Flash, the way or works, nor it's UI. But I look at it like Watercolor; it's its own temperamental medium that sometimes makes no sense.

[fluffy]

Ah, thanks again! I was trying to consult help but I didn't even know where to begin looking through it (keyword search didn't seem terribly useful since all the pages I saw about "shape tween" etc. basically just kept telling me the same basic things over and over again).

So, what would your recommendation be for complex things which involve lots of little mini-scenes with a couple of overarching graphical things which can't be easily split up into the separate scenes? Should I turn each mini-scene into a separate graphic? Is there a way to convert a group of frames into a graphic and preserve the layers? That would probably make my Flash project VASTLY more manageable. (In the meantime I guess I'll start making the new mini-scenes as graphics instead of creating a bunch of grouped layers on the main timeline. Thankfully I don't have any lip sync to worry about.)

[jimmortensen]

"So, what would your recommendation be for complex things which involve lots of little mini-scenes with a couple of overarching graphical things which can't be easily split up into the separate scenes? Should I turn each mini-scene into a separate graphic?"
Yup. :)

"Is there a way to convert a group of frames into a graphic and preserve the layers?"
See Dave Wolfe's "New Anim Clip". http://www.toonmonkey.com/extensions.html

And I agree, searching through Adobe's help files is usually an exercise in futility. :)

[fluffy]

"New Anim Clip" looks like it will make the difference between me finishing this animation and me going utterly insane. Thanks!

[fluffy]

Okay, it took me a little bit to figure out how exactly to use New Anim Clip but once I did I got my project nice and tidied up. Now everything's contained in graphics! Yay! Thanks!

And, the bonus of course is that I can still do the actual animation on the main timeline and now I know how to easily keep things from getting out of control again.

Say, is there a way to label frames with different colors? (Preview mode is pretty meh.) And, while I'm thinking about pipe dreams, can you actually zoom out on the timeline so that you can fit more frames on the screen? I feel like I'm looking at the timeline through a tiny straw, and I'm on a 1920x1200 monitor (even with the frame size set to "tiny")...

[jimmortensen]

"Say, is there a way to label frames with different colors?"
Unfortunately not. You can label a frame down in the properties window, and a little flag will appear in the timeline.

" can you actually zoom out on the timeline so that you can fit more frames on the screen?"
'zoom', no.

But if you poke around, some of the devs. of Flash have blogs. http://weblogs.macromedia.com/flashteam/ is accepting feature requests in their comments. :)

[fluffy]

Ah, oh well. I was hoping I could have a better indication of where the different scenes begin and end on my master timeline. Of course there's so many other problems with the timeline (like how the scrollbar tab isn't sized proportionally between the document and the view). Whee.

Anyway, you've been very helpful. Thanks for all the tips. :) Are there any specific web-based resources which would be an okay thing to just peruse and discover things from?

[jimmortensen]

Honestly I don't really know. I learned a lot through trial and error and frustration. But asking around always helps!

[fluffy]

Thanks, as soon as I got home from work I changed all the movie clips to graphics and they show up perfectly on the master stage! Very awesome. <3 <3 <3

[Matt Tamaru]

The answer is Animated Graphics. Juicy animated graphics.
Also Flash is one tool in the "tool box". I use Flash for a great deal of the work i do.. I also use other applications that compliments and extend Flash's capabilities.

Just like traditional animation... without a camera.. animation would just be a pile of flipbooks you share with pals. Where is the fun in that!

Most animators consider Shape tweening as a useless proposition. Just draw what you need :)

So no.. your not alone when you think Flash sucks... Truth of the matter however is that its a great tool once you learn how to extend its limitations. I love limitations.