I frequent Newgrounds, and I’ve been playing with the idea of experimenting with Flash. (I guess some part of me thinks that if a 14 year old can make something vaguely entertaining, surely I can, too.)
Yet, I can’t help wondering if all of these children aren’t paying the $699 retail cost for Flash. Sure, there’s a 30 day trial, but other than that – are there other Flash authoring programs out there? Or is it just rampant piracy? How are all of these kids drawing a stick figure hitting another one on the head finding Flash programs that they can buy with their allowance?
There are cheaper versions of Flash but they are all made by Macromedia. Flash 8 Pro is more expensive than Flash 8 and I think older versions (or secondhand copies, at least) can be bought for cheaper. But a good number of them probably just downloaded it over a p2p network or burned it off a friend, or downloaded the trial and turned their system clocks back to 1969, or something. The same goes for any teenagers you may see using Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter or any other reasonably expensive program.
For the record, Macromedia no longer exists. As of December 3, 2005, Adobe completed its acquisition of Macromedia.
What remains to be seen is what Macromedia products survive. Current trade speculation is Macromedia Flash is going to be rolled into a new product with Adobe Acrobat. Still, I would not sweat it. It’s going to take a year or so for things to work themselves out.
What do you mean by this? I’ve got several different programs that produce flash output; admittedly, they typically don’t offer anything like the functionality that would be required to produce a professional cartoon - they’re mostly about menus and banners - but what about, say 3D Flash Animator?
At one point Adobe had a program named LiveMotion for creating Flash movies. They only offered it for about a two-year stretch, in '98-'99. It is for the normal “website authoring” stuff like making menus, and you can also do “South Park”-style animations with it easily also. The Adobe support forum for LiveMotion has always been at least as active as most other forums there. Many people who tried both say that LliveMotion was easier to work with, but LiveMotion never had as many features as the Macromedia program did, even way back then. Adobe sent out a poll to registered users some time ago asking how much they would consider paying for an updated version of LiveMotion. It is a common complaint on the Adobe LiveMotion forum that the Macromedia programs just simply cost way too much for many people to even consider. IIRC the LiveMotion retail price (back when it was being sold) was $300, and the Macromedia “basic” Flash program price at the time was about twice as much.
I don’t know about the Macromedia programs, but the LiveMotion program is not good for doing hand-drawn animation because it can’t perform freeform morphing of shapes: it doesn’t let you shift individual points of a shape. Two programs for making hand-drawn animation are Animation Stand (has a small free version on their website) and ToonBoomStudio, but these two do not support intereactive content at all–you can only make a movie that plays straight-through, like a mpeg video file.
There’s also been a couple other smaller commercial shareware offerings for doing things like banners but these were limited, usually to “pre-fab” objects–like fonts, and embedding images. The couple I saw did not have anywhere near the capability of the Macromedia or Adobe programs. And there is a freeware/open-source project that embeds a static image into a swf file, but that is all it did last time I looked.
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Well whaddya know. I could have sworn only Macromedia programs were allowed to create swfs, but apparently that’s Flash players. Right then. In my defense, out of all the Flash discussions I’ve seen on deviantART I have never heard of anyone creating Flash with anything other than Flash (whereas there are many people using cheap knockoffs of other graphics programs). And since there is a pretty large overlap between Newgrounds and the Flash folks at dA I think the vast majority of them have the real deal too.
The Adobe/MacroMedia site says you can get Flash Professional for $249.00 or the full suite (Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Contribute and FlashPaper) for $299.00 in the student version.
Swift 3D is another non-Macomedia product that puts out swf files. When it was in development, it was available as a free download. Plus, cracking Flash is child’s play for anyone who moves in those circles.