State of the Art: Desktop Video and Web Animation, Part 2

By David Em

February 17, 2003

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Continued from the Previous Week

The emerging class of multimedia production tools support video, DVD, 3D, and web animation better than ever—and at a price attractive even to non-professionals. In the first installment of this two-part column I examained a number of these tools, including those from Ulead, Sonic Foundry, Compaq, Matrox, among others. In this installment, I look at offerings from Macromedia, Adobe, Hash, ToonBoom, and others.

Macromedia Flash

I'm dismayed to discover that the least evolved segment of multimedia production is web animation. For the moment, I'll limit my discussion of web animation to Flash output. It's no exaggeration to say that Macromedia's Flash Player has transformed the face of the web. The new MX version incorporates server-side features such as two-way video transmission. The client-side playback engine's only about 300 KB in size and, according to Macromedia, is now integrated into nearly every web browser on the planet.

I tested three of the highest-profile web animation tools: Macromedia's Flash MX, Adobe's LiveMotion, and ToonBoom Technology's ToonBoom Studio. All three have excellent qualities, but none of them is really quite there yet. All three work on Macs and PCs (though the Mac version of ToonBoom Studio currently lags behind the PC version).

Macromedia's Flash MX is overall the most capable package of the three. Since Macromedia created the Flash format, it's hardly surprising they're ahead of the competition in terms of features. Flash MX has unique server-side tools that are beyond the scope of this story, but are a boon for the folks who actually code sites.

All-singing, all-dancing videos and complex bitmapped graphics are very nice, but to make a site responsive to user input (even with DSL or cable) you'll need to use vector graphics, such as the kind produced by Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Vector graphics keep file sizes extremely small, while maintaining very pure color and high line resolution.

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