??? animation software best for me

[Gare]

Hi Lygia—

Let me add to this that Xara Designer Pro can not only build vector animations, but you can also export them to AVI, not just Shockwave file format.

Now, because of the nature of swf (okay, everyone calls them Flash, so I will, too), the animation is vector and the resulting animation not only scales to any size, but it's quite small. But there's a price here: "actors", your animated things or characters need to be vector, not bitmaps as you'd draw in Photoshop because actions you perform on actors need to be keyed so Xara can perform the tweening. Bitmaps can't really be keyed in any program efficiently, not in Adobe products, and not in Xara. Yep, you can animate a bitmap you import to Xara, however, every frame then becomes a keyframe and the saved animation is larger than it needs to be.

Xara is a pretty darned inexpensive program to begin animation as a hobby before you decide to make it a career or anything. Both the Standard and Pro editions support animation.

Here's an example; the darned thing is less than 15K

sample Flash animation created with Xara

My Best,

Gary