Making It To The Web
by Mark Winstanley
Animation has been a prominent force on the Internet since its inception. Even when the image files were tiny animated gifs, they were still...well, animated. Long before streaming video became an Internet buzzword (and sore disappointment), Web graphics with the look and feel of animation became the norm when viewing web pages on just about any site. Eventually the technology progressed and we've arrived in 2001 where programs like Macromedia's Flash enable fill blown animation delivery across the Internet, without the wait and choppy playback of streaming video.
Flash Is Still King
The biggest factor in getting your animated pieces onto the Internet and viewable by thousands of net surfers is the size of the pipeline over which they're delivered. Even though DSL connections and cable modems have proliferated, most of the world still subsists on 56K dial-up modems whose narrow bandwidth prohibits the delivery of smooth consistent streaming video. This is where Flash comes in. Flash was developed to deliver high impact graphics and sound over a small amount of bandwidth. Flash performs this feat by delivering only the instructions to recreate the images on the user's computer, and not the images themselves. It's like the difference between someone sending you the recipe for a cake versus the cake itself. That big chocolate cake isn't easy to squeeze through the mail slot on your front door, while an index card with the recipe slips right through, and you can recreate the cake on your side of the door.
 |
| A screenshot of Macromedia Flash 5's action
script panel. © Macromedia. |
Now don't get me wrong, you can scan animation sequences and import them into Flash all day, but your files can end up being huge and unable to be seen by anyone except those with the fastest of net connections. One solution to the problem is to draw the image sequences in Flash itself, although if you're used to more traditional tools to create your animations, this may be cumbersome and produce less than satisfactory work. Another solution is to use one of the many after market plug-ins or stand alone products that promise to take animations created in an environment other than Flash and transform them into Flash compliant, bandwidth friendly deliverables. Flash is such a hot delivery platform that every company seems to want to add "Flash-export capability" to the list of their product's merits. The problem lately is that although many companies are promising this miracle of content morphing, not all are able to deliver. We'll take a look at some of the most popular here, and the pros and cons of each.
 |
| An example of how bezier handles come in handy.
© Macromedia. |
For More Traditional Folks
First up are the products used to transform scanned images and animation cels into Flash compliant vector image outlines. The most popular for a long time has been Adobe's Streamline (www.adobe.com). Streamline takes scanned images and converts them to line art that is then ready to be imported into Flash or Adobe Illustrator. Streamline works quite well although it suffers from the over generalization of many Adobe products. They don't exactly come out and say anywhere, "Streamline was designed for animators and perfect to integrate with Macromedia Flash." On the other hand Adobe's products have a consistent look and feel and most releases are fairly stable, with Streamline already in its 4.0 revision. It works fairly well for animation except it seems to lose details that you have to go back and put in again by hand once you've imported your images into Flash. Streamline has often been likened to have a rotoscoping effect. Adobe's compositing software After Effects 5.0 will begin shipping in the second quarter of 2001 and is reported to be boasting a number of new Web enhancements as well.
|
