Flash 8 Professional
Review by Gabe Marihugh (www.creativelevity.com)

If you are a Flash designer than you don’t need me to tell you how great Flash 8 Pro is. If you are one of the few holdouts that thinks Flash is just an annoying plug in that will eventually go away when the Internet shifts back to its true purpose of text document delivery, well there’s no talking to you. But if you are somewhat new to Flash design and are wondering just what is up with this program that everyone is referring to in one way or another, well, here are my two cents…

Flash 8 was the last version to be released by Macromedia and has now joined the noble ranks of the Adobe lineup along with my very close ally, Photoshop. When I started with Flash (version 5) it was introduced to me as a “vector animation tool for the web.” I didn’t know what vector was at the time, but I had heard of the web ;) and from what I saw of what people were calling “Flash sites” I was impressed. By now, with the release of version 8 Pro, Flash is not only redefining the web (daily), but is also making big moves both beyond vector and the web.

Though Flash was sold to me as a “vector animation tool for the web,” I have always been compelled to bring the image richness of bitmaps created in Photoshop into the animation/interactive environment of Flash, a skill set that is not uncommon for today’s Flash designer. Now with version 8 Pro, this particular style of designer has been given some attention.

The most apparent new features for designers are the new Photoshop-like object blending modes and filter effects. The blending modes in Flash are very familiar to the Photoshop user. Though they work on a per object level rather than an entire layer (as in Photoshop), the basic idea is the same, and it opens up a very large creative door for people (like me) who like to just play around with images and blend modes to get ideas for a design. Just a few clicks later and an initial idea for a logo is given a composite treatment that takes it in an entirely new direction. Very handy.

The object filters are even more practical for me, because they can be easily animated right on the time line. The filters allow for some more very familiar effects like drop shadow and blur. When animated these filters can give you top notch results in seconds. For the beginning Flash designer, the filter effects provide a means of achieving top notch classic Flash effects that used to take much more work to get in previous versions.

I think what I like best about Flash (and version 8 more than ever) is its versatility. I can use it one day to put together a web site interface and the next to trace a bitmap logo that I I need to scale up as a vector for poster size printing. I never got used to Illustrator for handling vector files, it was just too much of a tool for my needs. Though I use pen tools when I have to (in both Photoshop and Flash), they always felt like they were smarter than me. But Flash provides me with intuitive tools to edit vector images. I love being able to just grab a line or fill and bend it without having to tweak little pen handles (though they can be nice to get a curve just right). Flash has everything a designer needs to create rich vector illustrations.

And lastly, I must mention Flash 8 Pro’s new video tools. As the Internet moves more and more towards broadcast image/video capability, the Flash environment is quickly becoming the easiest tool for video delivery online. Though I find some of the built in Flash components to be more trouble than they are worth, this is not the case with the FLV playback components and tools. Again, in just minutes Flash now delivers video in ways that would take much more thought to implement in past versions.

Overall, Flash 8 Professional is a design and media delivery tool that is quick to get into. You could start a career in days using just the FLV Playback components alone. Download the demo version and play around with it. You will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.