Is it just me or does Flash really suck?

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).

Tags: cs3, flash, rant, thisisbroken

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Permalink Reply by Stephen M. Levinson on March 5, 2008 at 8:31pm: and what does that have to do with the point of this post? People are creating amazing animation work with flash.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Vincent Veidt on March 5, 2008 at 8:49pm: Take it easy, Steve, if you learn to overcome adversity with tranquility and tact, your message will resonate to infinity.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Stephen M. Levinson on March 5, 2008 at 8:57pm: I think I should probably stop following this thread ;); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Vincent Veidt on March 5, 2008 at 9:46pm: ;); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jennifer Adkins on August 5, 2008 at 9:42pm: I agree, just look at Adam Philips. That is some amazing flash work. I think flash definitely has its place in animation, especially if you handle lightly a lot of those built in controls like the shape and motion tweens ( I really hate when people use those badly). I am using it as a learning tool because I already know my way around it but because I know it pretty well I have few complaints about its abilities.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kyoshi on March 6, 2008 at 12:47am: No I wasn't trying to pee in the wrong bush, when I said that. I meant that flashes web animation & design capabilities are far greater than their theatrical & character animation flexibility. Still we all have different preferences :); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tim Drage on May 3, 2008 at 6:47am: It's just you AND Flash really sucks. :); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Stephen M. Levinson on May 12, 2008 at 12:05pm: except, not at all; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by John F. Green on August 18, 2008 at 1:58pm: I have the same problems sometimes! i find everything In flash to be moderately easy but when it comes to editing and things My animation becomes a jumbled mess. I had to talk to one of my professors on organizing, and thats what helped me with flash. organize everything out before you start to delve into the work and things get out of hand!
-John; ▶ Reply to This