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With the advent of Flash version CS4, the very thing that made Flash a wonder tool was changed. The quality Quicktime video export didn’t function. What producers and animators found was a quasi-Quicktime video that had ghosts, artifacts, and the timing changed. Besides making access to the animation tools impossible to find, thus slowing down animation artists, CS4’s video export was useless. Work arounds were found but they slowed up the production substantially. The only solution most, if not all, animation studios came to was not to buy CS4 but keep their old Flash versions. This only works for so long though. As a prominent Dublin based animation studio discovered, acquiring the previous CS3 version was very difficult. To top it off, Adobe does not update and support the older version to work with newer operating systems. So, eventually the older versions of Flash will stop working. I recently spoke to a producer of a prominent Los Angeles based animation studio who told me they’re still using Flash MX2004! Cascades of complaints by the small niche market of 2D broadcast Flash animation studios to Adobe fell on deaf ears. My hopes that fixes would be made were dashed as I tried the newest version Flash CS5. Though the tools for the Quicktime video export look similar to the popular and functional CS3 version, the quality and problems we have with CS4 are still there. What are we 2D Flash producers and animators going to do? There are alternative Flash-like programs such as Toon-Boom, but most of the producers and animators tell a tale of high expense and over complexity. Unlike Flash, which almost every studio has, not too many studios have or can afford to equip their artists with Toon-Boom. If a studio in Dublin is using Toon-Boom and the studio they’re co-producing with in L.A. of Toronto is using Flash, the production pipelines are incompatible. An executive from L.A.’s Wild Brain Studio mentioned that they’re getting desperate enough to try to create their own software that works like Flash. This sounds like a great solution but not every studio has the capital to invest in such an endeavor. The wisest option is to keep the old functioning versions of Flash and wait until some developer somewhere comes up with a Flash Quicktime video export plug in that gives us the video quality crucial to a successful 2D production. This is the type of situation where Ireland’s animation industry could meet with Irish universities to co-develop a software solution and capitalize on the technology. Are there any budding computer geniuses at D.I.T. who’d like to meet up over a cuppa? Magpie 6 Media is a producer of 2D, stop motion, and CGI broadcast animation for its clients’ productions and in-house projects. Its main focus is on preschool animation but is also produces projects for older demographics. It has created and produced 80 x 2’ animated preschool shorts for Disney including the “Walrus-Duck ABC’s” series, and the “Professor Owl’s Class” series which teaches numbers. Magpie 6 Media is currently in preproduction on an Irish language preschool series (50 x 5’), teaching preschoolers practical things such as sharing, sorting, colours, numbers, and the like. The Irish language preschool project is an in-house production. For more info contact Cliff at cliff.p@magpie6media.com
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