Keyframer

I have never been more excited as a Flash user than I have right now. Richard Galvan, Flash Product Manager, announced at Adobe MAX and the Best in the South West conferences some of the new features they are working on for the next release of Flash (Flash CS4?). As promising as these new features look, keep in mind this is no guarantee they will make it into the final release. It is still too early to predict with any degree of certainty the success of implementing such robust animation tools - but it is sure nice knowing that the Flash engineers understand the needs of animators and is working hard to make us happy.
How does Inverse Kinematics and a new customizable spline path for tweens sound?
Don’t think the idea of an IK feature in Flash is brand new either. Eric Mueller (Adobe Software Engineer) showed me a working IK prototype for Flash after my session at Macromedia MAX in New Orleans back when Flash MX 2004 was the latest build! I helped him test his prototype and found it to be very promising but a bit buggy - but the idea was there and provided a glimmer of hope.
As we know, as of Flash CS3, we have not really seen any major advances in regards to animation tools. With Flash under the Adobe umbrella we now have very welcomed integration between various other tools, but a lot was added to Flash CS3 that is hidden under its hood - and I am not talking about authoring features. Sure Flash has received a bit of a face-lift, AS3, product integration and a few other nice work flow features, but one of the most significant changes was made to the very foundation of Flash in terms of the language the program was written in by its creators. Let’s just say, Flash CS3 now has the ability to be expanded upon in ways that were difficult, if not impossible with previous versions.
Another issue to consider is, a feature added to the Flash authoring tool also has to render in the Flash Player. If the player doesn’t or can’t support a feature at runtime, then there are problems. Even if the Flash Player engineers can add the support to the player, the next issue is just how much this new feature adds to the footprint of the player itself. I can remember during the Flash 7 or 8 beta, a feature called “Mesh Gradients’ was implemented into Flash. This feature allowed us to bend linear gradients and worked quite well inside the Flash authoring tool. But when I tested my movie the player had a hard time rendering the new gradient feature and ultimately the feature had to be pulled completely from Flash.
As of this writing it is safe to say Adobe has big plans for Flash and to make it more animation-centric. Not only may we *possibly* see an IK tool in our near future but a different way of applying tweens to objects (as opposed to frames). We may have complete control of tweens via a fully customizable spline path, thereby eliminating the need for additional Motion Guide layers. The tween and all of it’s properties would reside within a single span in the timeline layer.
Richard also informed me as to why the timeline, as we have always known it, has quirks associated with sounds falling out of sync with animation (even when audio is set to “stream”). The Flash timeline is *frame-based* - not *time-based*. Imported audio is time-based which is why longer animations tend to fall out of sync. The next version of Flash may see a time-based timeline which will open the door to even more possibilities - such as the ability to change the timing of the entire timeline after the animation has been completed. Ever finish a project and then have the client ask if the frame rate can be changed? As a result, the timing of all your animation is changed as well, and manually removing or adding frames to correct this issue is a major pain. If the timeline is time-based this would not be an issue.
There is so much more to talk about but I may be breaking NDA if I go any further. Let’s just say Adobe is listening to us more than ever and the future for Flash is very bright if you are an animator. Stay tuned…