Flash as a support special effects program

[milkmandan]

I am an avid Flash user for web content and the likes, but recently with the release of CS4 and what not, I've seen Adobe turn Flash into something more than just a publishing tool for rich web content. They keep pushing the Flash work area to mimic After Effects as well. Timeline / Layers at the bottom.

I personally have found the 'awesomeness' of using Flash as a supplement for effects in my videos, over After Effects in certain cases (not all ofc).
This is of course only if you have a deep knowledge of ActionScript.

Since CS3, Flash has been able to export ActionScript and capture it real time, and export with an alpha channel.
We can even drag the whole swf file straight in the timeline, and it reads and plays like a real movie clip.

Anyone else use Flash for AMV work?

I've used it already for several animated masks and text effects.

Due to the nature of ActionScript, i believe Flash has more potential (than AE) for more control over the desired effect.

I'd like to see more videos make use of this in some way. Be very interesting

[Zarxrax]

I've never gotten too deep into flash, especially actionscript, but what sorts of things can you do it in that you couldn't do in After Effects scripting?

[milkmandan]

I've never gotten too deep into flash, especially actionscript, but what sorts of things can you do it in that you couldn't do in After Effects scripting?

I am sure the both are actually quite similar as far as what each 'can' do, but i feel Flash has a minor advantage over AE for control.
I am not too familiar with AE scripting, but in Flash you can create methods and classes to do whatever you want.

I get the feeling in AE you are confined to the methods and classes that are default in the program. (correct me if i am wrong)

Flash you can create anything and whatever you want. As long as you know how to program it.

http://www.neave.com/light/
is a good example of AS effects. (if you got a microphone it matches to your music)

http://www.neave.com/imagination/
Is another good example. move your mouse around

both of these can be placed into Premiere or AE easily.

--
on a side note, since i am familiar with Flash more-so than AE, i feel doing certain effects are 'MUCH' easier in Flash than AE.
Tweening, and scripting is quicker imo.
and the layer system is a bit more friendly than AE.

[blabbler]

i think flash is primarily for doing vector animation and interactive web elements... so comparing it to what you can achieve with ae and the various tools/scripts/expressions is a bit pointless. they're totally different tools for different jobs, albeit with a tiny bit of overlap in terms of animating splines and stuff.

the pixel bender stuff from adobe looks interesting though... and if you haven't seen it you should check out "sita sings the blues" it's a feature length animation made in flash. and is freely distributed... and is good O:

edit: but yeah, it would be really cool to see more amvs with original animation or interactive elements.

[trythil]

I used Flash in my DDR Project 3 track for masking. It worked, but there are other ways.




- rant -

I also disagree on the "awesomeness" of Flash. The majority of my Flash experience is using via Adobe's Flex platform to build "rich Internet applications", and compared to other RIA platforms, I find Flex/Flash severely lacking:

- It doesn't have the ubiquity of HTML/Javascript (won't run on my gNewSense netbook, for instance)
- Neither ActionScript-the-language nor ActionScript-the-class-library are particularly advanced, compared to (say) C#/.NET or Ruby/its class libraries, both of which can be used as development languages for Silverlight applications. The deficiencies really come through when you want to do things involving iterating over a collection of elements: ActionScript's Array class has some ad-hoc things, like forEach and map, but if you want to do (say) left-fold or right-fold on a collection you're back to tedious for-looping, and unlike C# or Ruby, you can't extend existing object in ActionScript.

- The ActionScript compiler has some really annoying quirks: for example, you can't use constants in Bindable annotations, but the compiler will not error if you do
- Inconsistent implementations of bindings: some bindings, for example, will allow you to bind to a property arbitrarily deep in an object graph, but some (notably, column names on DataGridColumns) don't
- No generics in ActionScript, which really hurts with a language that allows you to statically-type many other things (which was also something that bugged me about pre-generics Java); this isn't so much a dig at Flash at ActionScript, but it's a shame that Adobe's stuff is locked into AS
- The Flex Builder tool has some bizarre quirks, such as
- term renaming throwing exceptions at odd times (recoverable, at least)
- a tendency to insert extraneous whitespace
- forcing you to manually sync changes that were made outside the IDE, which is very annoying if you use utility scripts to do things like stripping extraneous whitespace

About the only thing I really like about it all is the data binding system, but I can get that in other frameworks.

[blabbler]

i was gonna say that |:

[milkmandan]

wow nice rant trythil, however..
ur taking Flash to be a little too much. O_o in no way is AS comparable to C# and such.
too much detail about programming..

probably just me, but i find creating certain effects just easier in Flash.
- i do understand that Flash is not made for video, but the fact that it can be used in video, it is very interesting to see what it can bring about.
- i'd be excited to see what people can come up with.

[Zarxrax]

If you find it easier, then its probably just the fact that you are more comfortable using it. When I learned flash about 2 years ago, I thought it was illogical and made little sense, and I found it very difficult to do anything. They have actually addressed many of my major concerns in newer versions, though I just don't really use flash because I'm not comfortable with it. Even if I learned flash well, I'm not very good at programming, so I still wouldn't be able to make awesome actionscript stuff.

So in the end it's just another tool. Sure it can be useful for things. And if you are very comfortable with it, it can probably even be better for you than other tools. I think most amv editors stay away from it because its not really known as a "video tool".

[LivingFlame]

*waits to see an AMV with multiple paths to chose from*

[milkmandan]

*waits to see an AMV with multiple paths to chose from*

pretty sure this can already be acheived through a series of youtube videos and annotations.