Flash vs AS

[Nephilim]

Hi, I was talking to a friend of mine about anime studio. He likes to use Macromedia Flash Proffesional 8 and says that anime studio is not real animation and that you cannot publish your animations you make because the program does the work for you. Is this true? How can I tell him that he is wrong.

[myles]

I suspect your friend is confusing Anime Studio with some other program - there are some programs that come with pre-built characters with pre-built animations, and you can't create your own animations, but this is not the case with Anime Studio.

Possibly your friend is thinking of the pre-built characters that come with Anime Studio. You cannot sell the characters provided with Anime Studio as your own characters, but you can publish animations done with some of the provided characters (phrase 6E of the license if I'm interpreting it correctly - I'm not a lawyer). Some of the characters provided (particularly with the Pro version content) are 3rd-party characters (created by someone other than Lost Marble or e-frontier), and are copyrighted by their particular creators, useful to learn from but not necessarily available for publication (phrase 6B).

However, Anime Studio allows you to build your own original characters and create all your own original animation (as an over-simplification, it's like Macromedia Flash only with bones instead of pivot points, and it has more developed character animation features rather than the web programming features of Flash). The animation is as "real" as any created with Flash itself.

Assuming you've created your own characters, saying you cannot publish your Anime Studio animations because the program does the work for you is like saying you cannot publish your Macromedia Flash animations because the program does the work for you (or you cannot publish your painting because the paintbrush does the work for you).

So, probably a case of mistaken identity (your friend is right, but about the wrong program) or confusion between included content and your own creations.

Regards, Myles.

[jahnocli]

Ha ha! Your friend doesn't seem to know much. I use both AS and Flash 8 -- both programs can produce animation -- they are just very different from each other. AS does all the work for you? How ridiculous is that as a statement? AS is more geared towards getting animations up and running quickly, and offers aids to animation that Flash 8 developers won't -- or can't -- compete with.

Over its past few incarnations, Flash has been developed with programmers and developers in mind - not animators. You have to work a lot harder to make animations with Flash -- why is that a good thing?

[Touched]

People used to say the same thing about 3D animation programs (that they do all the work for you). Hell, some people think that Flash does all the work for you, too, with its motion tweening.

[Nephilim]

Thanks guys.

I dont think he had the programs mixed up... he just thought that it wasn't animation because you didn't have to create every key frame by hand.

[myles]

I dont think he had the programs mixed up... he just thought that it wasn't animation because you didn't have to create EVERY KEYFRAME BY HAND.

Well, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt, since as a Flash user he should be familiar with the Flash equivalents, motion tweening and shape tweening.

Some professional users have also noted that for some character animation they often have to keyframe just about every frame anyway (in Flash or Anime Studio) to get the animation they are after. Even with a choice of interpolation modes, the computer is a fairly dumb inbetweener (Richard William's "The animator’s survival kit" details the perils of plain inbetweening versus creative inbetweening).

Maybe he's referring to this when he refers to "real" animation (meaning more fluid hand-drawn animation) compared to computer-generated inbetweens (mind you, this is also a problem when you use tweening in Flash). That's the type of animation snobbery you sometimes get between fans of the fluid animation style of Disney feature films, and the "limited animation" techniques used in such shows as the Flintstones. Personally, I really like the limited animation style, including the more modern equivalents such as The Big Knights and King Arthur's Disasters.

I think it's more a difference of style rather than what counts as "real" animation.

Regards, Myles.

[Captain Jack]

This comes up a lot at 3D communities. Unfortunately, it often seems to be partly based in snobbery... people think that programs they paid a lot of money for are necessarily better than programs that are less costly, and they often deride the less expensive programs without really understanding the differences or capabilities of either.

I got involved in a discussion once wherein someone claimed that pictures made with the program Poser could not be considered "original art" because the 3D figures used were typically purchased from third party vendors, whereas his work (done in 3D Studio Max, IIRC) was original because he had to make the characters from scratch before he could render them. I pointed out that Pierre-Auguste Renoir made what many people consider to be quite fine art. However, unlike many artists before him, he did not commonly grind his own pigments. By this guy's logic, his art should be considered of lesser stature because he didn't work as hard as, say, Thomas Gainsborough. I'm afraid I didn't get a reply to that one.

[LittleFenris]

I dont think he had the programs mixed up... he just thought that it wasn't animation because you didn't have to create EVERY KEYFRAME BY HAND.

I think your friend needs to actually open up the program and use it, cause he obviously has no clue what he's talking about.

Unless he is doing traditional animation in Flash and is drawing every frame by hand himself, then he is contradicting himself since Flash does tweening which is letting the computer do some of the work for you in a sense.