What I can use to make professional flash banners?

[Audioicon]

Hello everyone,
I was wondering, what can I use to make professional flash banner, with buttons, individual content animation/effects and control.

Something like this. http://www.increditools.com/incredif...e/whatsnew.php

The problem with this program is that the images becomes blurry, dull or just loses resolution when I paste, insert or import them.

Are there any program excluding Adobe Flash that allows you to make stunning, professional banners without knowing Flash it self?

Please Recommend.

Thanks everyone.


AI

[renderhjs]

anything except the flagship flash itself is usually aimed towards amateurs and consumers.
Some can animate but are limited in scripting or interactivity while others are limited in design tools.
Flash itself has them all. You could try to buy a dated flash release,- for example anything starting from Flash MX (version 6) to Flash CS4 (version 10 = latest release) is better than the rest that tries to find a nichè.

and besides anything that has to do with banners is not really that propfessional or high demanding - so maybe you will have to do with such tools.

[Audioicon]

anything except the flagship flash itself is usually aimed towards amateurs and consumers.
Some can animate but are limited in scripting or interactivity while others are limited in design tools.
Flash itself has them all. You could try to buy a dated flash release,- for example anything starting from Flash MX (version 6) to Flash CS4 (version 10 = latest release) is better than the rest that tries to find a nichè.

and besides anything that has to do with banners is not really that propfessional or high demanding - so maybe you will have to do with such tools.

I completely agree with you.
But you are missing the point, why must one learn an entire program just to create a banner?

I'm a web designer, I don't have the energy to learn Flash and just need an interface I can use to create a banner, see what I mean.

I will love to learn Flash but if a designer is trying to learn PHP, ASP, Ajax, Javascript and all that, he needs something that can bridge the gap.
I don't make Flash websites but once in a while I like to add a banner.

AI

[renderhjs]

in that case test everything you can,- most applications provide a trial. I tried out some unique flash competors in the past but they all went bankrupt.

For example corel R.A.V.E once created by corel (guess it still is alive some how) but it never saw any real success
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satelli...=1047022734148

another one called live motion back from adobe in the 2000´s sucked balls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_LiveMotion
adobe stopped the project because it obvoisly sucked even sales wise - it simply could not compete with macromedias flash back then.

another family is swish and I believe they are still alive
http://www.swishzone.com/index.php
they focused on transition effects and templates for the less demanding user.
SwishMax (odd marketing name)
http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?a...ts&product=max
is little similar to Flash from adobe - it copies quite a few functionalities and lets you even script.
But if you read stuff like this from the software description:

- Includes over 350 Preset Multimedia Effects
- Creates Stunning Flash Animations and Websites with Ease
...

it should be clear that its rather aimed towards less complex and advanced projects, e.g family slide show

and then there are a ton of special banner tools but I dont want to even google for them now because I honestly never ever want to touch such crap.

My personal suggestion would be to get a older and cheaper version of flash. You might sigh regarding to learn flash but I can assure you that all you need for a animated banners can be learned within a few days. What eats up time learning usually is actionscript and the advanced interaction part.
1 big reason why applications such as Flash, Photoshop, 3dsmax,... are so popular is because of the shear amount of tutorials and free learning resources on the internet.

lastly another option could be using Silverlight (microsofts fresh attempt at copying flash)- I assume that expression is alot cheaper as the adobe software lineup:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
though honestly I must say that hardly any agency or designer uses it

[Audioicon]

in that case test everything you can,- most applications provide a trial. I tried out some unique flash competors in the past but they all went bankrupt.

For example corel R.A.V.E once created by corel (guess it still is alive some how) but it never saw any real success
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satelli...=1047022734148

another one called live motion back from adobe in the 2000´s sucked balls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_LiveMotion
adobe stopped the project because it obvoisly sucked even sales wise - it simply could not compete with macromedias flash back then.

another family is swish and I believe they are still alive
http://www.swishzone.com/index.php
they focused on transition effects and templates for the less demanding user.
SwishMax (odd marketing name)
http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?a...ts&product=max
is little similar to Flash from adobe - it copies quite a few functionalities and lets you even script.
But if you read stuff like this from the software description:
it should be clear that its rather aimed towards less complex and advanced projects, e.g family slide show

and then there are a ton of special banner tools but I dont want to even google for them now because I honestly never ever want to touch such crap.

My personal suggestion would be to get a older and cheaper version of flash. You might sigh regarding to learn flash but I can assure you that all you need for a animated banners can be learned within a few days. What eats up time learning usually is actionscript and the advanced interaction part.
1 big reason why applications such as Flash, Photoshop, 3dsmax,... are so popular is because of the shear amount of tutorials and free learning resources on the internet.

lastly another option could be using Silverlight (microsofts fresh attempt at copying flash)- I assume that expression is alot cheaper as the adobe software lineup:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
though honestly I must say that hardly any agency or designer uses it

Thanks for your input, your replies have been very thorough.
I was looking at this website http://www.circuitcity.com/
Look at the banner - how did they do that?
You click on the title on the left and it scrolls to the right.

How do you make all these animation in Flash? I know Flash has
present transition effects but not that many. Are there codes that is written to create all these effects?

AI

[renderhjs]

do you mean that center slide stuff where each slide cycles through after a certain time?
Actionscript I would say,- because there is so much reuse of elements (timer symbol, slider background, fonts, motion,...) that it would only make sense to script it so that you can easy swap content, swap order or add/remove as much as you want.

From time to time its also possible to mix designer mechanics with scripters mechanics. E.g you could animate the slides and time icons once in so called movieClips (the building blocks in Flash for scritping and animations). Then with a little script you tell after a time Event that you want specific MovieClips X to play now.
The Point is that it looks rather customized and that is why I highly doubt something like that is possible with just a simple banner animating tool.

Just a idea:
if you need this soon - why not ask a freelancer to create a flash movie for you that you where you can feed the content yourself. Flash movies using XML are very popular these days most flash developers should know how to work with it and thus be able to build you a custom slide tool.
You'd then only need to assign a custom XML file to the flash movie with your items (e.g wich title, image to display, link,...) and the flash movie would handle the transitions, interaction ect.

There is a freelance section here at flashkit.com
http://board.flashkit.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=98

just lastly a personal oppinion (again :P )
if you really want to be a designer and less code fixed like html, php, java : flash is a really good way expressing in a more individual way your visual ideas. If you suck at programming there is still animations,- and if you are not yet up to that there is simple button interaction and before that a great drawing application. I can really recomend learning flash and stepping into it.

[Audioicon]

do you mean that center slide stuff where each slide cycles through after a certain time?
Actionscript I would say,- because there is so much reuse of elements (timer symbol, slider background, fonts, motion,...) that it would only make sense to script it so that you can easy swap content, swap order or add/remove as much as you want.

From time to time its also possible to mix designer mechanics with scripters mechanics. E.g you could animate the slides and time icons once in so called movieClips (the building blocks in Flash for scritping and animations). Then with a little script you tell after a time Event that you want specific MovieClips X to play now.
The Point is that it looks rather customized and that is why I highly doubt something like that is possible with just a simple banner animating tool.

Just a idea:
if you need this soon - why not ask a freelancer to create a flash movie for you that you where you can feed the content yourself. Flash movies using XML are very popular these days most flash developers should know how to work with it and thus be able to build you a custom slide tool.
You'd then only need to assign a custom XML file to the flash movie with your items (e.g wich title, image to display, link,...) and the flash movie would handle the transitions, interaction ect.

There is a freelance section here at flashkit.com
http://board.flashkit.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=98

just lastly a personal oppinion (again :P )
if you really want to be a designer and less code fixed like html, php, java : flash is a really good way expressing in a more individual way your visual ideas. If you suck at programming there is still animations,- and if you are not yet up to that there is simple button interaction and before that a great drawing application. I can really recomend learning flash and stepping into it.

You have been very helpful and I appreciate you taking your time and being patience with my level of ignorance regarding this subject.

I don't need this right away but I have bunch of Flash 8 books I'm going to dust and browse through. Hopefully, I'll find sections that deals with animated banners. Are there any tutorials you can recommend for this particular subject?

Thank you so much.

AI

[renderhjs]

anything that covers timeline animations,- e.g how you define a tween and set key-frames, extend and delete them, thats all you need for banners

e.g
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...ne&btnG=Search

[Audioicon]

anything that covers timeline animations,- e.g how you define a tween and set key-frames, extend and delete them, thats all you need for banners

e.g
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...ne&btnG=Search

So what about pre loaders? Don't you need one for these banners.

Look at this IBM website http://www.ibm.com/us/en/ I am looking to make banners like these, not with the thumbnails at the bottom but with similar height and width.

I did not see a preloader but maybe it's because I have high speed internet. I know it transition when you scroll over the thumbnails and I'm not looking for that but would like the banner to change displaying the different products and services. on the banner and if you click on a particular image, the site goes to that page.

AI

[renderhjs]

well of course a little bit of actionscript might never hurt just like Javascript for html websites sometimes.
In the end you dont need to know 100% how it works at first - just look on the net what you need (e.g open link on image click, preloader, context menu away,...) and copy paste the script.
That's how I and many many others here learned Actionscript in the first place.

in case of a preloader,- piece of cake: just put this in the first frame - and start your animations with frame 2 or 3.
Script on first frame:

_root.onEnterFrame = function(){
    var a = _root.getBytesLoaded();
    var b = _root.getBytesTotal();
    if (a==b && int(b) > 0){
        delete _root.onEnterFrame;
        gotoAndPlay(2);
    }
} 

for anything else specific create a new thread