Hi. I currently use AfterEffects to do most of my animation, as I generally prefer to use bitmap elements (Photoshop artwork), as opposed to vector (…just an ‘amount of detail’ thing). However, I’m still looking into Studio or Animate.
What I’m wondering is how exactly Studio and/or Animate deal with bitmap elements… In Adobe/MM Flash, you are ‘advised against it’, as rotation of bitmaps causes file sizes to severely increase, etc. Is this the same case with these products too? If I intend to (sometimes) do a fully bitmapped animation, is this bad (in this software)?
Put another way, would it be wasteful for me to buy Studio/Animate if I ended up just doing bitmap based animations (cutout style)… versus using AfterEffects? Is it only smart to buy these programs if you are intending to do vector based exclusively?
I’m not TOO concerned (anymore) about file size, compared to how I was before…
I’m just really torn between these program’s nice user interface vs AfterEffects’ ability to do virtually unlimited types of effects (distortions, glows, comps, etc)… If I were doing relatively straightforward ‘cartoon’ style animations, it would be a no-brainer… but I can see myself wanting to use detailed Photoshop renderings (textured, shaded, character elements, etc) rather than the relatively ‘clean’ vectors…
Anyone have any suggestions/comments?
final file size will be bigger than a vector based animation due to storing the pixel data in the file…that’s IF your producing to swf output of course…if your outputting to avi, mov for the web or dvd/blueray for productions then there’s not much issue to be mindful of.
flash/toomboom based stuff is well suited for swf delivery for the net as it’s fast to load due to vector file format compared to pixel based [avi, mov]
thing is toonboom can do both…and you can mix and match as well…wharever works for you really…say a pixel based backdrop and vector characters or a vector backdrop and pixel based characters…your pixel based charaters would need to be created in a pixel app such as corel painter, tvpaint, art rage then the component parts [arms, legs, body, head etc] sent out as separate png files [with alpha] for example.
hope that helps.
steve g
Ya, that’s cool that you can do both. MM/Adobe Flash lets you do that too, but they seem to really warn you against rotating image based elements (makes the file size increase seriously, I think).
Just wondering if Animate has the same ‘issue’. I realize that the bare elements themselves will take up more memory vs vectors, but does animating them rotating/scaling create trouble as it supposedly does in Flash?
(Probably all a non-issue, as I can probably just render it out, one way or another, as a .flv file, which seems to do a great job of keeping file size down, yet still looking good…). Pure vector IS great for small file size, but it seems that these days it’s less of a concern for me… Maybe I’ll be doing the main character animations in Animate, then bring the render into AfterEffects and do some further stuff on it (opticals, distortion effects, etc)… Best of both worlds…
If you want to output with effects then it will have to become sequence of bitmap images or a bitmap movie so the weight of the original artwork doesn’t matter. The only thing that will matter is the output resolution.
If you were going to output to swf then it would have an impact but to output something in swf that had a lot of texture, effect, detailed bitmaps doesn’t make much sense.