Adobe Unveils Latest Flash Version
This morning, Adobe unveiled an elaborate array of CS3 suites – 6 to be exact. The ‘CS’ stands for creative suite, and 5 of these software bundles will ship with Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, or Flash 9. You can pre-order today on the Adobe.com website, but the software won’t ship for a few more weeks.
I’m particularly excited about the import tools from Photoshop and Illustrator.
I’d been using third-party software to manage this function, but soon you’ll be able to handle this natively while preserving layers and structure. If you’re building complex character models or backgrounds in either Photoshop or Illustrator, I’m sure you can list a few horror stories of trying to get your work transfered accurately.
There’s also a new set of drawing tools which are inspired by Illustrator’s functionality, which I never quite enjoyed, but I know many swear by.
You’ll be able to purchase Flash CS3 ala carte for $699, or as part of one of the Suites. For instance, you’ll pay $1,699 for the Production Premium Suite which comes with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere and several others.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I wonder what the trace bitmap feature will be like?
Basically, I wish the live trace feature from illustrator would be included in flash.
At least a basic version of live trace just for tracing black and white artwork.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
It ain’t no new feature, it’s a ‘key’ feature which already exist. Have no clue about Flash 9 but in prior versions, just import your image to the stage and go to ‘Modify’ menu, choose ‘Bitmap’ and ‘Trace Bitmap’ and you’re all set, a vector version of your artwork is created.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Ummmm.. I hope they’re not throwing out the original Flash drawing tools completely. As much as I hate “Brush Smoothing”, I hate Illustrator’s drawing tools even more.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Let me elaborate, the current bitmap trace feature STINKS. I want Live Trace lite to be included instead of the old Macromedia bitmap trace feature. This way I wont have to purchase Illustrator or a Wacom. Live Trace is very nice and I hope part of it replaces the old bitmap trace.
March 27th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Just went though the feature tour and boy, am I excited to get my hands on that . Integration with AI and Phootoshop is the much needed big step. Thanks for keeping us updated, Aaron
Cheers
March 27th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
My big hope would be that they fix the performance problem on the Mac. Geez, it’s unuseable compared to a PC, and that is a shame.
March 27th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Good god, it’s gotten expensive. Typical adobe. Eventually, like photoshop, it will get too expensive and then a third party software will come out of nowhere that will be alot better and cheaper. coughPaintShopProcough
March 27th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
What I really hope is that they have taken a few inputs from us animators and help make some of the much needed features as discussed in the forum ref : http://bbs.coldhardflash.com/viewtopic.php?t=19
March 27th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Well I hope they upgrade the brush tools to be more sensitive to hand drawn style animation, because as of now Flash 8 is horrible for that.
Many I know and myself included still use and like mx2004!
nyc
flashimator
March 27th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
I hope they have more line options that match the ones in illustrator because I love those brushes and adding them to lines in flash would remove the conjunction of flash and illustrator for me.. it’s annoying going back and forth for brush lines
March 28th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Excellent. Really looking forward to this. Drawing in Illustrator isn’t as intuitive as in Flash, so I hope that they don’t tamper with that too much.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:34 am
I went to the adobe webcast in albuquerque, and I’ve gotta say that the whole suite looks amazing. I think that Photoshop Extended looks freakin’ amazing. The ability to make 2d photos into 3d images and then dump them into after effects for a full on 3d model.
March 28th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Can Flash export a Quicktime yet?
March 28th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
While the Photoshop and Illustrator imports are welcome, it seems Adobe does not want to cut into the sale of either Illustrator or After Effects by adding Live Trace or a camera tool.
And to call the Illustrator pen a “rich drawing tool” is marketing hyperbole, if not an outright lie. A rich drawing tool is the Illustrator brush!
The one promising addition is the convert animation to actionscript feature. It may be possible to create a mixer where animation clips can be sequenced on a timeline like the nonlinear animation mixer in Softimage or Maya.
I am, though, disappointed that the upgrade does not include more artistic tools. A while back, I had expressed, in a post regarding ToonBoom Solo, the belief that Adobe would not listen exclusively to developers when creating the next version of Flash. I was wrong. It seems the developer community is the only voice Adobe heard. At least the new development tools will allow the coders in the Flash animation community to update the toolset. Business as usual, I suppose.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Unfortunately Flash may never export a Quicktime on a PC, it’s an operating system problem, Windows won’t allow it. Macs have always done it, which is one of the many reasons why Flash works a lot better on a Mac than a PC. Quicktime is the best format to export video in from Flash, it allows you to do true HD quality 24 FPS renders at 1920×1080 pixels, and creates smooth, perfect picture quality without having to to compressed AVIs or sequential image exports.
However, the brush and pencil tools on a Mac version of Flash haven’t been the same ever since Flash 4.
In Flash 4 the smoothness and acccuracy was unparalleled, and once version 5 came out the drawing tools’ response to the Wacom tablet turned to crap, and it has been ever since. The PC version wasn’t effected as badily. Many don’t know this fact because most people started with animating with Flash at version 5 or 6.
For anyone that’s used Sketchbook Pro, imagine that ease and smoothness in Flash! That’s how Flash 4 was, it was just a joy to draw with, I hope they fix that in the new version.
As for the trace bitmap thing, Adobe Streamline has always been the master for converting your clean pencil scan to a sleek vector line. Flash has always done a good job of it too, not as smooth as Streamline, but if you play around with the trace bitmap settings in Flash 8 you can get very close to the same quality, it takes a while you just need to experiment with it, it helps to compress your “levels” in photoshop first before importing the scan into Flash, Use the ‘image adjust; levels’ in photoshop to make a higher contrast black and white image so there’s less “grey” for Flash to choke on.
Tracing it by hand directly into Flash or illustrator is always the best way to get the final clean-up lines you need. Even if you find the drawing tools suck on your computer as you’re tracing over your scan in Flash, simply Zoom in close, use a thick pressure-sensitve brush, go slowly and have your hot key ready (hold down Option or Alt) to switch to the arrow tool to quickly mold and shape the thickness and tappering of your line as you go and you’ll the exact lines you’re looking for.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Ron said…
“Unfortunately Flash may never export a QuickTime on a PC, it’s an operating system problem, Windows won’t allow it.”
I disagree that the problem is with Windows. If that were true, QuickTime Pro running under Windows would not be able to transcode an AVI to native QuickTime.
Digital Video’s Toonz and The TAB export to native QuickTime. Anime Studio (MOHO) does as well. It seems the export to QuickTime in Flash for Windows involves little more than changing the file extension from SWF to MOV.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Ron, not only is it possible to export Quicktime on a PC (as many applications do) Flash 9 now finally has added this feature.
Quicktime being a higher quality format is a misconception though. AVI can export to the exact same quality as Quicktime can and as far as I know it always has. It tends to work faster with PC video editors too. Until now there was no reason to add Quicktime export on a PC but with Flash 9 the Quicktime export allows you to capture Action Scripted animation, Movie Clips, and filters/blend modes. It didn’t look like AVI export could do that but I could be wrong about that.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
There is a misperception about .MOV files and .SWF files exported from Flash. In Flash, you can export a Quicktime ( essentially a swf in a QT wrapper) or Quicktime video ( A rasterized video version of the animation in Flash). By just changing the extention, you are merely making the default launch app for that file Quicktime rather than Flash player… but nothing else. If you wanted to import that swf into AE, you would run into problems. Accoding to the Adobe presentation yesterday… AE will seemlessly import SWF files, and it also appears that Flash will have a more robust export settings for exporting layers individually. I am very excited about this if it turns out to be true for it will eliminate an exhaustive process of “guiding” and exporting layers from Flash to be used in AE.
Overall it looks like this lastest version of Flash will have some improvements and it is very heartening to see Adobe embrace the video/animation production aspect of what Macromedia previously saw as “web-content software” only.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:55 am
You took the words right out of my mouth Roman.
I was just about to add the fact that yes PCs export QTs just foinr, but they are not true QT Codec, rather an SWF in disguise.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:31 am
The “SWF in disguise” bit is no longer the case in Flash 9. It exports a Quicktime video.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Any news on JSFL developments in Flash CS3?
March 29th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Excellent, that’s good news for PC users, too bad it took so long to make that happen, now let’s hope the brush tools for Wacom improve for us Mac users.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
does anybody knows whether the new suite will allow me to use filters on graphic symbols as well as on Movie clips?
March 29th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I didn’t get a chance to peek at any new jsfl stuff yet, I sent some requests a while back but I don’t know if any got implemented. I only got a chance to play with a copy of it for a few minutes at the launch party and there was no mouse on the computer…I hate trackpads with a fiery passion!
Filters are really just clips of code that get added to your movie clip when you export, and since you can’t have code attatched to graphic symbols, no filters for them. But now that you can render Movie Clips to video it doesn’t matter as much.
March 31st, 2007 at 10:49 pm
yeh,in PC flash 8 and MX, you just need to go into publish settings and change the flash player to ver. 5 to publish an swf imbedded quicktime.( it took me 3 years to realize this)
April 11th, 2007 at 6:46 am
hopefully the pen tool will not suck anymore, i hate the implementation in current versions, it should work like photoshop and illustrator
April 12th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
does anyone know if the old pencil tool and brush tools be maintained? I’ve been using flash for so long that I actually like these tools and can draw really easily with them.I looked at the Adobe demo several times and I saw that the old pencil tool was still there, But I can’t confirm if the brush tool was. Anyone know the lo-down this? I actually really dislike the illustrator drawing tools, so to me this isn’t exactly an improvement.
April 29th, 2007 at 1:37 am
I’ve been using flash cs3 and love the new pen tool and other cool little features, but I’m having a major issue with exporting a quicktime 1920×1080. It doubles every frame (when exported and viewing the info for the movie file in Quicktime Pro, it reads 16.8 fps when I actually specified 30 fps for the export) when I export at this size, with or without any type of codec. If you have cs3 please try and export at this size and let me know if you have the same problem, and if not how the heck did you do it?? Thanks!
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I have the same issue regarding frame rate mismatch with exported quicktime movies.
Document Properties: Frame rate is 24fps, Size is 1280×720
When exported to quicktime at 24fps, the rendered mov file is 24.39.
This occurs consistently with all codecs.
Haven’t found a solution.
re
October 9th, 2007 at 3:45 am
We are having the exact same problem. The only way to get true 24 fps is to export a PNG sequence and open that sequence in QT and export the codec of your choice. Unfortunately, there’s no ability to export the audio simultaneously and you must sync audio to picture in QT or Final Cut. But at least you have 24 frames instead of 23.81 (in my case). If anyone can shed some light on this one, please let me know. Another way to do 24 fps is to export an SWF and then open it in QT and then export to a QT movie of your choice. Again, the audio cannot be output from the SWF QT export (grayed out) but you get a 24fps picture.
Any thoughts?
March 17th, 2008 at 10:21 am
According to me it’s a much better version then the previous one.