Moderators Lee Knight Posted November 2, 2011 Moderators Share Posted November 2, 2011 How does this work? http://balihoo.com/ I know how to do the animation in Adobe After Effects. Then apparently I can import that to Adobe Flash (which I know nothing about but I guess soon will). So... is that what's happening here? Flash for web? I don't know anything about web either. But I've been asked to try and implement some of my very simplistic yet apparently popular (among our brass) animation and motion graphic style to one of our marketing products web portal. So... ...Flash... right? And if so, what resolution size should I be rendering to. My inexperience is showing here. Hey, I'm a musician and audio dude. So what size graphic should that be to recreate the graphic you see in the Balihoo site? Thanks for any help you can provide this fish out of water. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rsadasiv Posted November 2, 2011 Members Share Posted November 2, 2011 Definitely Flash - my company home page has almost the same widget. I can ask our web guy how he did it if you want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted November 2, 2011 Author Moderators Share Posted November 2, 2011 Definitely Flash - my company home page has almost the same widget. I can ask our web guy how he did it if you want. Yes please! Yeah, it looks the same. I right-clicked (duh) and it showed it as Flash. I just learned that I can create in After Effects, which I'm comfortable with and has more extensive text/motion graphic capability than Flash. Then import into Flash. At which point... I suppose the web stud takes the Flash render (.swf? .flv? .xlf?) and does his thing. So what size canvas/project do I work in for eventual web/html delivery? I'm lost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rsadasiv Posted November 2, 2011 Members Share Posted November 2, 2011 Yes please! Yeah, it looks the same. I right-clicked (duh) and it showed it as Flash. I just learned that I can create in After Effects, which I'm comfortable with and has more extensive text/motion graphic capability than Flash. Then import into Flash. At which point... I suppose the web stud takes the Flash render (.swf? .flv?) and does his thing. So what size canvas/project do I work in for eventual web/html delivery? I'm lost. I sent him an email, but he's a contractor, so it might be a while Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted November 2, 2011 Members Share Posted November 2, 2011 Yep, Flash. You should always be able to tell if a web page feature is Flash by right clicking on the feature; if you see a pop up that says, among other things, About Flash... that's a Flash element. A given page might include any number of Flash elements. Problem 'with' Flash, of course, is that iOS dependent devices (iPads, iPhones, iPod Touch, etc) do not support it, forcing one to try to make do with the mess that is "HTML5" -- I use quotes because, of course, HTML5 is not a standard yet nor will it be for some years to come. (Perhaps as long as a decade, depending on whose line of self-serving BS you buy into; to hear some vested, 800 pound gorilla interests talking, you'd think HTML5 was a done deal that offered not just everything Flash does, but more and better. But that's a shiny, white fantasy. Many HTML5 features that remain among the most needed are not standardized and not supported uniformly across current browsers. Someday, it'll be great. I guess.)* Anyhow, they tell us you can't ignore the iPad and iPhone, so people have tried to find ways of regaining some of the functionality, cross-platform compatibility, and relative ease of development of Flash through the features of HTML5 that are supported by the modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, ~IE9) with enough uniformity that cross-browser compatibility can be cobbled together. Happily, the need/desire for such functionalities is widespread enough that the complexity of such non-Flash functionalities is being addressed by (often open source) frameworks designed to attempt to offer cross-browser compatibility with somewhat graceful degradation and APIs that can provide at least some of the capabilities of Flash. One free/affordable but somewhat limited tool I've seen that gives some of the functionality of that Flash presentation linked above is Easy Rotator: http://www.dwuser.com/easyrotator/ (Some of the 'cooler' features need to be 'unlocked' by a low-cost site license. I think it's something like $30 or so to license the 'pro' features for a given site. But you can play with them on your local machine to develop your site and get an idea of how they work.) *It may sound like I'm some sort of Flash 'advocate' -- but, frankly, I have a personal distaste for Adobe (to the extent that I've so far refused to buy their versions of Flash and Dreamweaver, after they bought Macromedia to get them), and I've always had a not-quite-love-but-certainly-hate relationship with Flash. If anything, I can't help but feel like it's gotten worse since Adobe took control. We'll definitely be better off when there are fully open source ways of providing the same functionalities from standardized, non-proprietary development tools. One important aspect: the Flash format has been opened and can be used by others -- but the playback engine is still proprietary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted November 2, 2011 Members Share Posted November 2, 2011 A minor point: there is a difference between something animated and rendering in flash, and streaming video through flash. Ae-> Fl gets you a stream of your Ae project, and IME you're better off just rendering the Ae from Ae, regardless of how you stream it. And there is a difference between the paged slideshow at rsadasiv's example (which I am actually taking a break form working on ATM) for which javascripting is a really nice way to implement, and the fast, hi-res motion graphics, for which flash is a pretty good animation tool. You can do the same thing in flash (the original example does this), if you're already animating in FL, but you can do it much more efficiently with jquery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bookumdano2 Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Here's something that may help-http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Here's something that may help- http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Next time I send a draft to a client, I'ma see if I can run it through that on the way. Now, that'd be tough, but since they have another handy tool: http://www.shadyurl.com/ it's a lot easier to fool folks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 That looks to me like straight-up Flash... done in vectors, with no film or other fancy stuff plugged into it. A good FLASH practitioner can make rather simple things look more impressive than they really are Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Well heck, you're totally right. Not how I woulda done it, but whatever works . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted November 3, 2011 Author Moderators Share Posted November 3, 2011 So an animation from Flash gets exported as a .swf then embedded in the html code. Right? For that size of box, what is the resolution? I'm sure I'm saying this stuff all wrong... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Yah, it gives you the html, js, and swf files. However, (and this is only IIRC) it doesn't compress very well, and not much my animations were converted to anything usable in the flash editor. It uses the project sizes for the output, but you have some control over it in the export dialogue (also IIRC). But you can try it out pretty quickly, and that is the best way to determine how it's working. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ernest Buckley Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Here's something that may help-http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ Let us not forget, there was a time when that was considered "cutting edge". Sort of looks like something the Art audio gear guys would have created in the early-mid 90s... goes along with their gear look... you know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Here's something that may help-http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/Priceless! I really like the way it customizes itself to the page. The NY Times looked entirely different than my band blog: http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=3&music=8&url=onebluenine.com -- and it looked entirely different than my biz site, which got a very slick treatment: http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=6&url=tkmajor.com I may adopt some of their ideas. Particularly like the animated Pegasus and striding pagan bikini queen. Not to mention the animated gif of a young Bill Gates turning into a devil. Very tasteful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 So an animation from Flash gets exported as a .swf then embedded in the html code. Right? For that size of box, what is the resolution? I'm sure I'm saying this stuff all wrong... That's how it works. You can make an *.swf in any size at all, then embed it in an HTML Layer or Frame. In 2000 or so I did a big Flash anim about the size of this one for my sister's Interior Design firm website. In those days, the Web was slower, people's computers were slower, and the anim I did--- however beautiful, and it surely was--- took forever to deploy, and, on many displays, played haltingly or jerkily. Dippily, I also imbued it with an MP3 audio soundtrack--- in STEREO, no less!---- further bogging things down. It was partially my fault: in those days, I did not know how to optimize my vector and bitmap images to get them as tiny in filesize as humanly possible. (PHOTOSHOP and FIREWORKS now enable you to squeeze filesize of bitmap images wa-a-ay-y-y down without sacrificing much image quality.) So I was unfortunately exporting Flash anims that sometimes went as big as 1 MG. eeek... that's a real no-no in FLASH-land. If you optimize (and recycle) your images correctly, you can and should turn out an anim that weighs no more than 40 KB. Bear in mind that, in 2000, it was still very difficult-- almost impossible even--- to feature video online that wasn't postage-stamp-sized and extremely jerky and hiccup-y in playback.... necessitating eternal preload times... (How quickly we forget just how recent that was). Nowadays--- eleven years later--- everything is much faster, and video, even HD video, plays flawlessly on most people's boxes. (and if it doesn't, they seriously need to give the damn thing to Goodwill and outfit themselves with a new setup). I haven't done Flash in a while: at first, to include a Flash anim on one's website was dazzling and novel.... Most websites (except for annoying and ugly little animated GIFS) were static, after all. Then, after awhile, it became more commonplace, and most web surfers started resenting it whenever it appeared--- even Flash developers themselves--- because so often it simply marked time with cutesiness or pretentiousness.... preventing them from actually accessing your website's true content. As blue2blue intimates, the jury is still out on whether Flash enhances--- or bogs down--- a website. The trend, starting in about 2006, was to have ever larger anims crop up, up to and including making your entire website out of the Flash spec. Nowadays, Flash can be used as the vehicle for straight-up video of all kinds... audio, too. ie., SWF's which include none of the vector and bitmap animation that Flash was initially famous for. I will admit that the "Let's-get-big" ethos (ever-growing widescreen layouts and bigscreen monitors) turns me on wa-a-a-y-y more than the "Let's-get-small" ethos (Blackberries, cellphones, iPods/iPads). Perhaps it's because, at 48, I'm old, nearsighted and have fingers the radius of Kiolbassas. The Flash software is now much more sophisticated than it ever was, and many, many supercool "tricks" have evolved to make anims more dazzling.... many of which (as I implied in an earlier post) involve sleight-of-hand, making the viewer see more than is actually there (e.g. convincing motion blur, scrolling backgrounds, movement along the three Euclidean axes... appearing to look like 3D, etc.). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 So I was unfortunately exporting Flash anims that sometimes went as big as 1 MG.There's an animated gif for that one: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 Let us not forget, there was a time when that was considered "cutting edge". What would that be exactly? GeoCities in general, or making a site look like GeoCities? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 And in all seriousness, I don't think GeoCities was ever considered cutting edge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 And in all seriousness, I don't think GeoCities was ever considered cutting edge. Oh, I dunno.... In 1998 it looked terribly exciting and novel and inviting. (-; Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted November 3, 2011 Members Share Posted November 3, 2011 "The Flash software is now much more sophisticated than it ever was, and many, many supercool "tricks" have evolved to make anims more dazzling.... many of which (as I implied in an earlier post) involve sleight-of-hand, making the viewer see more than is actually there (e.g. convincing motion blur, scrolling backgrounds, movement along the three Euclidean axes... appearing to look like 3D, etc.)." Yah, but that is in the realm of Flash as an animation tool, which is a great use for the thing. I gotta say that, as a pro web dude, I do not like flash for web for a variety of reasons. IME, anything that flash does well is better implemented in javascripting or serverside. With the advent ajax and json and all the other frameworks, there is so much that can be done without it. I can't comment on the video aspects, but even then there are other ways of working with video playback. The real deal killer for me about flash, and I'm thinking specifically of things like wix where you can create an entire site out of flash, is that a website built around flash is almost impenetrable as far as the larger web goes. On the last flash-based site I worked on (http://weinsteinjones.com/) I had to create a php proxy just to get it to bring in an RSS feed. Not to mention the difficulties in how a site like that deals with indexing and linking. For me, the preference is streaming video or jquery, unless you have a specific application that you need to build in flash: presentation is best left as close to html as possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted November 4, 2011 Members Share Posted November 4, 2011 [quote=scarecrowbob;44282998The real deal killer for me about flash, and I'm thinking specifically of things like wix where you can create an entire site out of flash, is that a website built around flash is almost impenetrable as far as the larger web goes. On the last flash-based site I worked on (http://weinsteinjones.com/) I had to create a php proxy just to get it to bring in an RSS feed. Did your client request that you give him Flash in that website? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted November 4, 2011 Members Share Posted November 4, 2011 Yah, it gives you the html, js, and swf files. However, (and this is only IIRC) it doesn't compress very well, and not much my animations were converted to anything usable in the flash editor. It uses the project sizes for the output, but you have some control over it in the export dialogue (also IIRC). But you can try it out pretty quickly, and that is the best way to determine how it's working. Actually, if you're canny about what you're doing, you can pack a big amount of animation into a tiny file size, particularly by proper use of vectors. Also, the last few versions have had very good video compression, although I generally advocate using YouTube or other hosted video where appropriate. Why put the bandwidth burden on your client site's server when most users are probably more comfortable with a YouTube video -- and it's so easy to plug a YT vid into a site in any one of a number of ways? You don't have to stick with the 'presets' in the share/embed interface. If you use full embed code [instead of an iframe], you can have fairly granular control of the YT interface, getting rid of controls, logos, and customizing the look by changing the parameter strings (just remember you have to change them in two places in the embed code). Not to mention that increasing amounts of YT content are available via Android or iOS YT app. Flash still offers the best control and compatibility for desktop users -- but, of course, there are a lot of iDevices out there that won't ever really support it (unless there's a shocking sea change at the Great White Citadel ) -- and, for that matter, there are undoubtedly a number of older Androids that either can't run the Flash plug in or whose owners simply haven't installed it. (Like me. I could install the Flash Android player plug, but if my iBrothers and iSisters can't see it, I don't want to, either. ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted November 4, 2011 Members Share Posted November 4, 2011 When I was seriously using FLASH back in the day, I became especially turned-on by advanced practitioners of ActionScripting, like Robert Penner: Robert Penner does FLASH More than just writing in shuttlebacks and flash-forwards and repeating snippet into FLASH, he was actually embedding complex fractal mathematics into his ActionScript. And doing it purely with vectors.... (not "cheating" by including bitmaps and video.) Achieving some FX that were sensuously, dazzlingly beautiful (but frankly, not of much use on a serious business website). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted November 4, 2011 Members Share Posted November 4, 2011 "Did your client request that you give him Flash in that website?" Actually, I was handed the mostly completed project when the other developer working on it went to work as a programmer for a coin shop (in Boerne, BTW), just before the business I was working for moved from Fred. to right next door to same coin shop. But yes, flash was spec-ed as the method. At this point, I would much prefer to do the same project on jquery, for the reasons I outlined above, not to mention personal fluency, which is a big deal (personally ) And you guys are totally spot on that you can indeed pack a wollop into flash, especially when you are doing vector based animation... though to return to the OP, we're not talking about canny programming of vectors.... IME Ae->Fl pushes a whole lot into rendered video.... like any layer with bitmapped info (IIRC...). To return to the more interesting digression: hosted video is a great tool, especially if it is by another source such as youtube-- which I don't think gives you control over aspect ratio, but is my recommended medium.... if you want so see something bad, check out this dog I did while I was working at the company for which I no longer worked. She wanted flash..... she wanted butterflies landing on the umbrella. On an unrelated note, this is why I will, for as long as possible, remain freelance: http://billandsheila.com/ IME, less will always be more. The web is largely -not- video, and while motions are great, it's like having animation on a billboard: interesting but bad for oh-so-many-reasons. And to return to the op, this is my general advice: if you are designing for video, use video... if you are designing for the web, design for the web, even if you're integrating video. But the Fl-Ae workflow is (and this is just my opinion) a bad compromise between two different media, with different demands. Sorry to be long winded.... it's just more relaxing than writing about the folks I was running sound for this evening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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