looking for a simple animation program - other than Flash

T

tylaum

New member
I've tried Flash and don't like it. I made a little ball roll back and forth across the screen for 5 seconds and it was a 98 MB file.

Please tell me about any other animation programs where you can import a little jpeg of a man and make him walk wobbly across the screen ...and maybe move his eyes and mouth around.

Nothing fancy. No real soft, fluid motions. Just moving stuff "cut-out" style - kinda like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python stuff.
 
The file size doesn't really matter because it depends on what compression you used.

If your doing banners I guess Flash is popular. Otherwise I'd google "2D animation software" and try out some demos, if 2D is what your after.
 
tylaum said:
I've tried Flash and don't like it. I made a little ball roll back and forth across the screen for 5 seconds and it was a 98 MB file.

Please tell me about any other animation programs where you can import a little jpeg of a man and make him walk wobbly across the screen ...and maybe move his eyes and mouth around.

Nothing fancy. No real soft, fluid motions. Just moving stuff "cut-out" style - kinda like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python stuff.
Click to expand...

I don't mean to critique you, but I think that you didn't set up your animation correctly in Flash if the file came out to 98 MB. I would suggest sticking with Flash and learning the program, as it is a wonderful tool. I do a lot of web development and have created a lot of interactive websites and I would hate life without Flash for web dev.

I would suggest maybe looking for a book about animating with Flash. Oh, and another option would be maybe looking into After Effects and animating Photoshop layers with it. Either way though, you'll need to spend some time learning the program before you can really evaluate how it is.

If you choose to go with Flash, make sure after you import a graphic to your timeline that you convert it to a movieclip symbol. That way you reference the movieclip and Flash doesn't have to reload the graphic each time you keyframe. I think that's how you ended up with such a large file. If you import a 10kb graphic file, it would only be stored once and loaded in as 10kb when used as a movieclip. If you keyframe the bitmapped file without converting to symbol, you are storing/loading 10kb times how many keyframes you have used it in.

I just made a quick sample FLA with a ball being moved by classic motion tweens in Flash, with easing. It is less than 1kb in file size. If you want me to send it to you so you can check out what I did, just PM me.
 
wildfly said:
I would suggest sticking with Flash and learning the program, as it is a wonderful tool. I do a lot of web development and have created a lot of interactive websites and I would hate life without Flash for web dev.
Click to expand...

Hmm, lots of people are moving away from Flash since it can't easily be indexed by search engines and it's not supported on the Apple iPhone, iPod or iPad. Javascript or HTML5 seems more future proof but they're a lot harder to work with.
 
Thanks for the replies, but I'm gonna stick to drawing individual frames on post-it note pads and just flipping them in people's faces. It's much more of a personal viewing experience that way.
 
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