Newbie ?: Flash MX vs. KoolMoves

[mdobson]

Can someone fill this new kid in on the difference between Macromedia's Flash MX and KoolMoves, et al?

Are programs such as KoolMoves and its bretheren simply cut-down versions of Flash MX, or am I completely missing the point.

Don't want to start any wars or step on anyone's toes, just don't know the difference. :-)

Thanks.

Regards,

Mick

[Bob Hartzell]

Are programs such as KoolMoves and its bretheren simply cut-down versions of Flash MX, or am I completely missing the point.

-> There is truth to this statement but there is more to the story. Each tool has a different emphasis. Flash MX has no native effects but other Flash tools do. KoolMoves has better point manipulation capability than Flash MX and is intended to be easier to use. No one can compete with Flash MX's action scripting environment.

[necromanthus]

Put it in this way:
Flash MX + Freehand MX = KoolMoves
500$ + 400$ = 40$ ???
ha ha ha

:p

[johnie]

All versions of Flash can work with both Vector and Raster graphics. The original intent that the makers of Future Splash and later Flash 2.0 was to make an esier to use hybird computer graphic program that can handle both types of graphics and would be esier to use than photoshop or illustrator. Macromedia used to sell a stripped down version of just the graphic engine called MM Sketch.

KoolMoves in contrast mostly works with Vector Graphics. Inside of KoolMoves there is only so much you can do with the raster images. You must use a seperate Image Manipulation tool (As KM is windows only you already have one if not two included in Windows- MS Paint and MS Photo Editor... not to mention there are many very very good free tools, like Gimp for Windows or project dogwaffle, or low cost editors, like mediachance's real-draw or MGI/Roxio photosuite, avialble to consumers.) to edit them.

Likewise Flash MX comes with an option to convert certian video formats directly to Flash or to export your movies into Quicktime.

The biggest difference is in the interfaces. Koolmoves mostly (Although KoolMoves does have some timeline/score like tools) uses a frame based aproach to animation, previously used by most video and animation tools before Flash, MMDirector, and other tools made the timeline/score aproach popular , where as Flash uses a mostly timeline aproach. Why is this a big deal? Simply put it is easier to learn and use the frame based model than the Timeline based one however the frame based aproach becomes dificult to manage multiple timelines and more complex animations using multiple timelines. This is why KoolMoves has the Storyboard and score tools in it.

Another difference with KoolMoves from Flash is that KoolMoves has SVG Import and Export capabilities. SVG is a W3C standard for drawing and animating vector art in a XML schema. Currently there are several third party Plugins and 2 browsers that support SVG nativly to some extent. Although the SVG import and export is not complete yet in Koolmoves 4.1 (The State of SVG Import/Export was still rather Basic in 4.1), it is going to be improved in later versions, the basic shapes are there. Illustrator, Corel Draw, RealDraw Pro, JASC Web Draw, Open Draw, the next version of MS Visio is to support SVG, and just about every drawing application can both import and export SVG. This means that once SVG Import/Export is complete you could use your KM created works inside these aplications or export directly from these applications and import into KoolMoves. Its actually quite neat to export drawings from Sodipodi and then import them into KoolMoves to animate them. There is also anotehr benefit here. everal other third part SWF tools like, Swift3D and ToonBoom which lack scripting environments also export to SVG. Besides interoperability you also have another option if you want to export your work into a web format.

Pricewise most of the general third party Flash Tools are around $40-$50 these days. Corel's RAVE 2 http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel/Products/productInfo&id=1047022054397 has finaly been split off and as I predicted it is priced at $40 to compete with the other third party apps except for LM2. Most of the Niche apps are priced between 50-100. While many animation studio software that export to SWF, such as ToonBoom and Animo, are as expensive or more expensive than Flash.

Although there are several free Flash tools such as OpenOffice 1.1 (RC 1-3 Both Impress and Draw can export as SWF- The SWF will stop every three frames and there is limited Animation. As impress can faithfully import most MS PowerPoint it is a free FLash to Powerpoint converter), Motion SWF (Converts Image Sequences, AVI, MP3, and MPEG into SWF), Gif2SWF (Converts GIFs to SWF), Wink (Makes product demos in SWF), Camstudio (Can convert AVI to SWF or export directly to SWF, used used for tuts and product demos but is the SWF is not of high quality), WinMorph (Morphs photos into each other-can export to SWF), Wax (Video composition tool that can export as SWF), DrawSWF (Makes simple line drawings and text effect animations-Java Based) and there are several others. many of the freewares come from the Open Source Comunity and are fairly usefull and of fairly high quality with many being cross platform solutions. Most of the Freewares and OS applications are very specific in what they do. Notice that most of these apps I listed are niche tools that perform a certain task. Most of the free tools do outperform their shareware/Consumer alternatives, however as of yet however the Open Source comunity hasn't developed a GUI'ed multipurpose SWF creation app- there are several Open Source Command Line and Server side apps and Libraries for composting SWF which has advantages in certain cases (On the Fly SWF Creation) over an application.

[mdobson]

Bob/Johnie,

Many thanks for the informative posts. Although, as a beginner, I understood little of what you said, Johnie, I did save your post for later down the road. Hopefully, by then, I will be able to digest more of the comcepts you spoke of. :-)

Cheers,

Mick

[tmoore935]

johnie- I know that vector images never loses their clarity when resized since it is a set of equations that determines the picture. But i never quite understood rastor. Or why you would use one over the other.

There is also the original question of koolmoves vs flash mx. Koolmoves has a better forum to answer and explain questions.

[johnie]

Raster Images or Bitmap images are a a series of tiny squares the smallest of which is called a pixel. The computer then takes each pixel and colors it. Thus your picture is 62 X 28 it is 62 pixels by 28 pixels. A raster / bitmap graphic thus has a color value for every pixel and only looks good at the size it was created at. If you scale a bitmap then the computer does this by making each mapped pixel bigger and you get distortion.

The advantages of bitmaps is that you can get a complex image at high detail without using a lot of processing power. The downside is that without compresion they are larger and they also distort when scaled.

JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIF, TGA, and MNG are all Bitmapped Graphic formats.