If you’re even a casual Web surfer, you’ve probably run into sites that use Macromedia Flash. When released, Flash sent something of a shockwave (Ouch! Sorry.) through the Web community by providing a high-quality, low-bandwidth method for delivering animations with sound and interactivity.
A vector-based streaming format that also provides limited support for bitmapped graphics, Flash caught on quickly, and Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer soon added playback support. Today, it’s not at all difficult to find sites that utilizes Flash animations or Flash interface elements.
Flash’s underlying technology is robust and well-implemented, but the Flash application itself leaves a lot to be desired as an authoring and animation environment. Adobe LiveMotion, the recently released “Flash killer,” marks the first competition to Flash. LiveMotion brings Adobe’s years of animation experience to bear on the Flash authoring market.
Pulling a number of tried-and-true interface designs from Adobe After Effects, LiveMotion emerges as a very strong competitor to Macromedia’s current version of Flash. Curiously enough, however, LiveMotion does not pack as much authoring power as its competitor.
So which one is right for you — Flash 4.0 or LiveMotion 1.0? That depends on the type of projects you are creating. We pit the two packages against each other to compare their strengths and weaknesses through a typical authoring workflow.
Element Creation in Flash
Flash animations achieve their high performance by using a vector-based graphics format, known as Shockwave Flash or .SWF format. Because vector-based graphics require much less storage than their bitmapped equivalents, .SWF files can be very small and therefore transfer very quickly. Of course, some images — such as photographs — cannot be represented easily with vectors, if at all. To accommodate such images, the SWF format also includes support for displaying bitmapped images.
The Flash application includes basic drawing tools that take a unique approach to vector drawing. While high-end vector-based illustration packages such as Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand use complex bezier pen controls to create paths and curves, Flash uses a simpler set of graphics primitives and paint brushes.
Flash’s interface provides an integrated Timeline/Stage window, as well as simple tool and library palettes.
Flash includes what at first glance appears to be a very basic drawing set: rectangles, ellipses, pencil, paintbrush, paint bucket, and eraser. However, the shapes you draw with these tools don’t behave like their counterparts in traditional drawing programs.
All shapes, including brush strokes, are automatically smoothed and converted to vector outlines, each with a shape and a fill. Any object’s shape can be edited simply by clicking on it with the Arrow tool and dragging to reshape its outline. Flash automatically takes care of calculating spline controls so that you don’t have to worry about manipulating control points or handles.
These tools are great for creating simple objects, and they are perfect for users who aren’t already accustomed to vector-based drawing. More-experienced illustrators might miss the additional control that features such as bezier-curve tools allow. In addition, creating a complex shape often takes much more manipulation than would be required with traditional vector tools, because complex shapes require more control than is available with Flash’s drawing palette.
Flash also provides unique automatic boolean controls. Set two objects of the same color on top of each other, and they will automatically “union” into one shape, while objects of different colors will carve each other apart. Though this can be a handy feature, it can also be frustrating if you want to maintain editability of stacked objects of similar colors, as Flash will simply “union” them into one big shape. Though Flash provides simple transform commands (scaling, rotation, flipping), it lacks any sort of filters or other effects tools, making it difficult to create more-complex textures or colorings.
For times when you need to create an illustration that seems too complex for Flash’s capabilities, you have several options. You can import illustrations created in Illustrator or FreeHand, or you can create a bitmapped illustration in a painting program and import that bitmap into Flash.
Importing bitmaps is a quick and easy way to create complex illustrations, but the performance hit of this approach may offset its advantages. Fortunately, Flash has an excellent Trace Bitmap command that can automatically convert a bitmapped image into a set of vectors. Trace Bitmap is speedy and does a great job of rendering even complex photographs as bitmaps, though you’ll often need to manually optimize the results to reduce the huge number of vector shapes that can be produced.
All in all, creating complex content in Flash can be very frustrating if you’re accustomed to more powerful tools. But if flying text and simple geometric shapes are all you’re after, then Flash’s toolbox will seem well equipped.
Element Creation in LiveMotion
As one would expect from the company that produces Illustrator and Photoshop, LiveMotion packs a lot of illustration power. With a comprehensive toolbox and a full suite of filters and effects, LiveMotion is a very capable image-creation program backed up by Adobe’s years of interface refinements.
LiveMotion includes the standard ellipse and rectangle primitives, and adds polygon and rounded rectangle tools. These shapes are defined by the usual control points and can be easily reshaped with a simple arrow pointer. Unlike Flash, LiveMotion also includes a bezier pen tool that lets you create complex curves.
LiveMotion provides a series of tabbed palettes similar to Adobe’s other products. As in Adobe After Effects, compositions and timelines are kept in separate windows.
In some ways, however, Adobe’s product design is baffling. Though presumably attempting for years to unify the interfaces of its applications, the company seems to have balked from completely committing to the idea. As an example, LiveMotion’s pen tool lets you add and remove control points, or change corner points to curve points, but it uses an entirely different interface for these actions than either Photoshop or Illustrator. Nevertheless, users with experience in either of those apps will figure out the new tool very quickly.
LiveMotion’s editing and effects capabilities are comprehensive and impressive. The Styles palette lets you efficiently add complex styles to any shape, and the Transform palette provides a simple mechanism for rotating, scaling, skewing, and distorting. The Distort palette provides such complex distortions as Twirls and Lens Effects, while the 3D palette can create a range of effects, from Bevels to Ripples.
LiveMotion’s color controls are much more robust than Flash’s, offering complex gradients and a simple palette for controlling stroke and fill colors.
Finally, LiveMotion supports Photoshop filters for bitmapped objects. Actually, LiveMotion provides better support for Photoshop filters than Photoshop itself! A LiveMotion palette displays all the filters currently applied to a particular object. At any time, you can deactivate or remove a filter, or change a filter’s parameters. This is a facility we’ve long dreamed about for Photoshop.
Curiously enough, Adobe has for some reason decided to leave out some features that are provided in its other applications. Missing from LiveMotion are a History palette (a la Photoshop), a Pathfinder palette for performing boolean operations (a la Illustrator), and an Actions palette for scripting operations (a la both Illustrator and Photoshop). Also, because we found Flash’s Trace Bitmap command so useful for streamlining performance, we’d like to see Illustrator’s AutoTrace facility imported into LiveMotion (despite the fact that it presently doesn’t do as good a job as Flash’s tracing command).
Simply put, when it comes to content creation, LiveMotion wins hands down. Flash simply can’t compete in this area.
Animation in Flash
First off, let’s say outright that it is possible to create complex and detailed animations in Flash, as is apparent from some of the Flash animations one can find on the Web. However, creating those animations (or even simple animations) in Flash can be a miserable experience.
There is so much wrong with Flash’s animation interface to this writer’s mind, from fundamental design problems to weird bugs, that it’s difficult to convey completely why Flash animation is such a drag. But one has to try.
First, there is Flash’s Timeline, a dope-sheet-like expanse that shows you every cell of every layer of your animation. If you’ve ever worked with a 3-D application, Adobe After Effects, or a keyframable-effects interface such as those in Adobe Premiere or Apple’s Final Cut Pro, then you know you don’t need to see every frame of an animation; you only need to see the keyframes. This may seem like a personal preference, but Flash’s approach creates serious limitations. With a keyframe-only view, it’s easier to see the big picture, making it possible to quickly zoom in and out of your timeline to make changes or to ease navigation. Navigating a complex animation in Flash, on the other hand, requires a tremendous amount of clicking and dragging.
Flash’s Timeline is a frustrating spreadsheet-like affair that shows separate cells for every frame of an animation, precluding easy navigation and zooming.
Setting keyframes is cumbersome in Flash, requiring you both to manually insert keyframes and to manually specify tweening between keyframes. Unfortunately, all of this manual control doesn’t really buy you any extra power, just a lot of extra clicking.
For some animation effects, objects must be converted into symbols using a special menu command. You can drag instances of symbols out of Flash’s Library palette and onto the stage, allowing you to make global changes to your animation by simply updating your animation’s symbol. All imported images are loaded into your Flash project, rather than simply linked to your original files. So, if you want to update a bitmapped image, for example, you have to re-import it and update your original symbol. Simply linking to an external file would make updates and revisions much smoother.
In general, Flash’s interface is cumbersome and clunky. You use many functions or set many attributes, such as an object’s transparency, using modal dialog boxes, which you invoke by double-clicking on an object’s keyframe. In addition, the program is plagued by numerous quirks that quickly become infuriating. For instance, if you want to move a keyframe you must click on it to select it, and then click again to drag it to its new position. Unfortunately, if your second click comes too soon, the program will think you were intending to double-click on the keyframe, and it will open up an unwanted dialog box.
Flash provides some very simple velocity controls — you can specify a keyframe as Ease In or Ease Out — but these options provide no fine control and are difficult to use.
Finally, Flash’s bitmap rendering is often unpredictable. Stationary bitmaps frequently have curious motion troubles that cause them to jitter, and bitmaps don’t always render out the same way twice, often exhibiting random artifacts.
Given that it began by selling an animation program (the ancient VideoWorks for the Mac), it is astounding that Macromedia has created such a sorry animation interface.
Animation in LiveMotion
Like Macromedia, Adobe has a lot of experience with animation interfaces, as exemplified by After Effects — the company’s high-end compositing and animation package. For LiveMotion, Adobe has chosen to pilfer a lot of After Effects’ animation tools, but the company stopped curiously short of porting some of After Effects’ more powerful features.
Animation in LiveMotion is everything that animation in Flash is not. With LiveMotion’s simple Timeline window that only displays keyframes, you can quickly and easily script an animation with control over any number of object properties. As in After Effects, LiveMotion’s Timeline displays separate channels for properties ranging from position and rotation to skew, scale, and opacity. To set keyframes, you simply move the playback head to a new time and drag your object to the desired location. Keyframe creation and tweening are performed automatically.
LiveMotion’s Timeline displays only the keyframes for each object, making refinements of keyframe timing very simple. Easily navigable and fully zoomable, the LiveMotion timeline provides context menus for changing interpolation modes of individual keyframes.
Just about everything is “animatable” in LiveMotion, including the program’s transform and distort features. Noticeably missing, though, is the ability to animate Photoshop filters that you have applied to bitmaps. As this feature is built in to both Premiere and After Effects, it’s very curious that it’s missing here. Perhaps Adobe is afraid of competing with its own products, or perhaps it is simply an attempt to dissuade users from relying on performance-inhibiting bitmaps.
Adobe also neglected to port After Effects’ excellent velocity controls to LiveMotion. Though LiveMotion does allow you to specify keyframes as Ease In and Ease Out, the program lacks editable velocity curves, which are ideal for creating tightly choreographed motion.
As with Flash, imported elements are loaded directly into your LiveMotion document, rather than linked. Consequently, updates and revisions can be a bit of a hassle. We’d much prefer something like After Effects’ Project Window for managing and linking external files. We’d also like the ability to nest animations inside each other to ease organization. Flash provides this facility by letting you divide animations into Scenes, which can be nested inside one another. This is another curious LiveMotion omission of a facility that could have been imported from After Effects.
Finally, LiveMotion includes a unique animation Styles facility. This feature provides pre-scripted simple animation movements that can be dragged and dropped onto an object. A library of simple bounces and fly-ins is provided (complete with pre-scripted stretching and squashing) and, of course, you can create your own. Though this first appeared kind of silly, we quickly realized its potential for easing the creation of uniformly animated interface elements.
Interactivity
Though it might seem that LiveMotion truly is a Flash killer, Adobe has dropped the ball when it comes to scripting and interactivity. LiveMotion provides enough scripting control for the needs of most users, but experienced Flash creators who utilize Flash’s full scripting facility will be disappointed.
LiveMotion provides a simple Behavior interface for performing branching (either to other parts of a movie, other movies, or other URLs), for starting and stopping sounds or movies, for creating simple loops, and for controlling the preloading and unloading of heavy graphic elements.
In addition, the program provides the simplest interface we’ve seen for creating roll-over buttons. The Rollover palette lets you easily create new states for any object and easily attach behaviors to each state.
Alas, LiveMotion lacks a number of powerful and important scripting features, including robust Java support, creation of variables and mathematical expressions, the ability to control the playback of other movies, and a facility for reading data from an external file.
For the creation of simple movies and interfaces, LiveMotion probably provides all the interactivity and scripting you’ll need. For the creation of Flash-based applications and more-complex interfaces, LiveMotion 1.0 simply doesn’t cut it. Perhaps in later updates Adobe will add more scripting functionality.
Exporting
Both LiveMotion and Flash provide good export controls, delivering the ability to export to any number of animation formats including SWF and QuickTime. If you’re hoping to get the best of both worlds — by using LiveMotion for graphic creation and animation and Flash for interactivity — you’re out of luck. LiveMotion cannot save native Flash source files. Instead, you can only export an SWF file for importing into Flash. Unfortunately, when you import an SWF file into Flash, you do not get access to or control over any of the individual elements. Rather, each frame of your SWF file is imported into a separate, non-editable frame of your Flash movie.
Move Over, Bacon: Now There’s Something Meatier!
If you’re a Flash dabbler or a serious Flash professional who needs nothing more than a tool for creating animations and simple push-button interfaces, then LiveMotion is an excellent alternative to Flash. Though we’re disappointed that Adobe chose not to bring over more technology from the rest of its product line, LiveMotion is still a much more powerful drawing and animation program than Flash.
If you regularly use Flash to create complex interactive applications involving multiple movies, the importing of data from external files, internal calculations, and variable manipulations, then LiveMotion is not going to provide the scripting controls you need. And, unfortunatley, there is currently no way to pass source files between the two programs.
Hopefully, future versions of both programs will learn from each other’s weaknesses. Whether we see a Flash with better animation controls, or a LiveMotion with better interactivity controls, Flash authors are facing a bright future.
Editor’s note: Macromedia has announced Flash 5, which will reportedly incorporate a completely redesigned interface, bezier drawing tools, shared symbol libraries, and other enhancements over Flash 4.0. Keep an eye on creativepro.com for a full review of Flash 5.0.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on August 22, 2000
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I have been using both Adobe and Macromedia products for a while and have experience with both LiveMotion and Flash. Most of what the writer is saying is nothing more than personal preference and is obviously not based on using them on a daliy basis to create or design animation. Each has it’s pros and cons but I would say that he has missed a few points. It might be advisabel to actually talk to people who use the software and see how they are using it along side other applications. Flashes drawing cababilities are basic, but anyone doing complex images wouldn’t even dream of doing them in Flash. That’s why Illustrator and CorelDRAW both support SWF export filters.
After reviewing both programs, I find that the author has correctly summarized the weaknesses and strengths of both programs.
Why is someone comparing LiveComotion to Flash 4? The Flash 5 features have been published for a month now … and readily available to all, inlcuding Mr. Long Gone!
Flash 5 corrects many of the ills that the writer highlighted. All the features of Flash 5 were well known prior to the release date of this article. Poor and irresponsible reporting at best.
OK, Disney has it’s KeyFrame artists and it’s in-betweeners but still every, maybe too conservative?, true animator knows that drawing and designing every frame on it’s own creates the best animation. It’s that ‘keyframe-focus’ that’s responsible for all the semi high-tech horizontal and vertical movement just because it’s easy, be it Flash or LiveMotion created. In this respect I recommend another article by this site on Brody Neuenschwander. LiveMotion answers the need for those fast/cheap anims, Flash let’s me tweek with ease every detail in every frame. I use both and this reviewer was indeed no true animator.
Pretty straightforward. Flash provides better interactivity. LiveMotion is a more adept animating package due to its similarities to AfterEffects. More authors should right about creating linear elements in LiveMotion and importing their resulting swf files into Flash. Using both tools is the strongest solution.
The artical is right on when it says Adobe stopped short of creating a Flash killer. Live motion has a great interface and I’d love to see it grow up in version 2.0 to hav emore interactive authoring capability. It also needs to export SVG animation. Please, Adobe, don’t make us live with bad Macromedia authoring tools any longer than necessary!
The most powerful feature of flash is action scripting. I personally use FreeHand for my complex objects and only animate in Flash. LiveMotion has no action scripting features. LiveMotion’s swf files are generally larger due to the strong reliance on raster images. So you get larger downloads and less interactivity. Definately not worth saving a few clicks.
I feel this article was (curiously) one sided. The reason so many features are missing from live motion should be obvious: Adobe always leaves out useful features in first release products, so that people have to purchase upgrades.
One last comment: Macromedia didn’t invent Flash, remember it was purchased as Fururesplash. So if you are going to review a product please do the proper research and talk to people who have used it.
I am not anti Adobe, I love Photoshop, but leave Flash to the experts.
In a word, the reviewer is clueless. I seriously doubt he has used Flash for anything beyond research for this article. Anyone who can say that drawing in Flash is difficult obviously has only drawn in bezier programs. If you are an artist, Flash is easier and more intuitive. And to say that Flash is only good for simple design and flying letters, calls into question whether Mr. Long has looked at the web in the last 2 years.
I also found his opinion on LiveMotion either rather naive or based on something less savory. LiveMotion is the single most counter-intuitve program I have tried this year.
I went to a LiveMotion seminar hosted by Adobe recently and the presenter had a difficult time understanding what I meant by a symbols library. He admitted he’s never used Flash. He demonstrated that there is no way of organizing, editing, and re-using symbols. LiveMotion attempts this, but if you edit an instance, it changes ALL the instances. You can’t edit each one individually. This might be why LiveMotion files tend to be larger than Flash files.
This article was so heavily anti-Flash, it didn’t bother to focus on what was right about it. First of all, that they had the foresight about 5 years before Adobe realized they should get their ass in gear about the internet. I was wondering when they were going to realize the web existed and now that Macromedia took the first step, I am becoming a fan of the trailblazer, and not the copycat.
Most of the article I agree on, but……
IN the near future flash 5 will be released. I have heared some things from an insider and she said that macromedia’s purpose with flash will be much more on the interactive site than on creative sites. In flash 5 you will have the possibility to get much more control over the movie than ever before. Meaning a better behavior sector and much more java scripting possibilities. I think that you flash will try to give as an alternative to HTML…….Lets check it out
While the interface for Flash is less “intuitive” than most design applications, once learned Flash is a dream.
An Adobe rep recently told me that the reason LiveMotion doesn’t contain the features of Flash 4 due to Macromedia not releasing the code. Flash 3 code is released and was utilized to create LiveMotion. Maybe once Flash 5 is released the Flash 4 code will be set free and the complex scripting actions will be available for LiveMotion to incorporate.
Is inferior .swf exprting…. Files overall size upon export from Livemotion are substantially larger than the same file exported from Flash.
Having worked with both Adobe and Macromedia products since 1988, I’ve had the pleasure and frustration of evolving with these products. This article mirrors my feelings about the shortcomings of Flash, and hopefully will open reader’s eyes to a superior alternative. If you are a “creative mind” you will appreciate the intuitiveness and consistency of the Live Motion interface. The article does a fair job of identifying how objects and animation are created, and how Adobe’s experience with After Effects is a perfect pre-requisite for a superior animation tool. I suffered through the inconsistent behavior of Director, resisted jumping on the Flash bandwagon because of a similarly half-baked interface, and am glad to see that Adobe has finally risen to the occasion. (If only they had helped mTropolis overcome Director dominance!) As the article mentions, there is still a lot of room left for growing the interface and feature set, so vote with your dollars so that Adobe can make improving this product a high priority!
Ease of use is NOT always better, being able to view key frames only is certainly NOT better, and many of the quirks and bugs you have referred to are most commonly associated with Flash on the MAC. As far as using bitmaps in Flash and the problems you stated with them not compressing consistantly is basically a lack of experience and research on your part. Flash export’s very consistanty if you import it with the proper image and file format (goes back to the old saying “Garbage in Garbage out”).
Granted, Flash does take some time to get use to, and to understand. But I have to give credit where credit is do, I love Macromedia’s interface. I love the fact you can edit every frame and once you understand the application, the possibilities are endless as to what can be done in Flash. I do agree with you though on your comments about its drawing tools, and its lack thereof.
And on a final note, if all you want to create is animation, your career may be short lived. The entertainment of animation-only is short lived, and the Internet community is already bored with animation-only web sites, users want interaction, and to provide interaction you need the powerful scripting features of Flash.
But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong ;)
> So, if you want to update a bitmapped image, for example, you have to re-import it and update your original symbol. Simply linking to an external file would make updates and revisions much smoother.
Actually you don’t need to reimport. You can double-click on the small bitmap icon in the Library pallette (not the name of file you want to update, but that tiny icon), and this will open a dialog, where you can specify certain compression options and click “Update” button. That’s it.