Flash - Designers and Animators

Hi all,

I was just wondering how many people here use Flash strictly for Design or Animation, as opposed to for Code or for a mix of Code and Animation?

The reason I ask is I've always been more on the ActionScript side of things, myself, but I work in an industry (broadcast animation) where the vast majority of users I deal with day-to-day use Flash strictly for art. From that end, they're finding that with each new version of Flash, it becomes more of a tool for developers than a tool for animators or artists. A lot of animation studios have made the switch to Toonboom Harmony and Toonboom Solo for solely this reason.

I had a quick chat with Mike Downey at the last Flash in the Can conference in Toronto, and he said that Flash 9 will have a lot more tools for designers, but when I mentioned some of the basic things which would be easy to implement and would win back a lot of customers from the animation side of things, I got the distinct impression that a lot of these features were brand new ideas to him. Some of the easy stuff shows up on a list below (mixed in with stuff that's not so easy).

Basically, to this end, I'd love to be able to get a list of features together that I could bring his way that the users want. I know the following features are things that I'm continually asked about/for:

1) Being able to rotate the stage at authoring time (much like being able to turn a piece of paper so that you can draw from a different angle)
2) Better control/keyframing of tweens, so that you can have motion controlled in a similar sort of way as AfterEffects (or LiveMotion used to, for that matter)
3) Better support for Movie Clip effects when exporting image sequences, AVIs or Quicktime Video (many MC effects get dropped when publishing to anything other than SWF) (can be done now with FlashANTS)
4) Better support for colour palettes/more default palettes (I was given the impression that the next version will probably have this, but I'm not sure)
5) The ability to export video at different pixel aspect ratios (eg NTSC or PAL frame sizes)
6) Better support for raster images within Flash (Flash 8 has a nasty bug which causes PNGs to corrupt, forcing you to reimport)
7) Better/more control of bezier curves (it's always improving, but I'm still getting gripes about this almost daily)
8) Fix for the bug where layers with complex linework created in Flash MX/MX 2K4 won't import properly and will corrupt the layer (workaround is to copy/paste in place the linework into a new layer, delete the old layer, and save & compact)
9) Ability to use colour profiles (colour calibration when multiple people are working on files is such a massive pain!)
10) Better implementation of swatch libraries (such as textures, etc.)
11) Better import of vector images from other apps (Illustrator, Xara, Corel Draw!, etc.)
12) Ability to do camera moves (pans, trucks, complex camera moves, etc.)
13) Ability to place items on different z-planes, and scale appropriately during truck-in/truck-outs and do parallax scrolling on camera pans
14) Ability to import files modelled in 3dsmax and/or Maya without a plugin
15) Ability to copy/paste from other vector apps, such as Illustrator, Xara, etc., with objects retaining their structures and/or their colours (right now the colour shift when copying/pasting from Illustrator to Flash is INSANE!)

Whew! That's a lot of stuff...there's more in my list, but I'd love to hear opinions - how many of you would use features like these? What other features would you like to see? What features do you think in this list (or that already exist) are completely useless?

Any and all input is useful, folks!

Thanks a mil...

I'd love to have 2 modes to Flash, a traditional flash mode and an AfterEffects / LiveMotion mode.

LiveMotion was an awesome tool, too bad the support for it is gone.

The flash timeline kinda sucks in a lot of ways.

Bezier curves are terrible from what I am used to. I try to select multiple points to move them in a path, such as a rounded rectangle, and it simply does not work. It might work the first time I create it, and then not after that. Ridiculous.

Regarding your 3D model comment, import 3D models from Blender too.

Allow for different transitions to be applied quickly between scenes, to make scenes a lot more useful.

I use a mix of code and animation, graphics mostly in fireworks as i find it easier if i need to adjust them when working on a draft, dabble a little with corel and freehand.

Manny2k