[ http://www.animonger.com/flashtools.html ]

by Rob Kohr

In the animation industry there exists a driving force to always do stuff cheaper and faster without sacrificing quality. About 5 years ago most independent animators began to make films using the computer, and little has changed over the years expense wise. Either you shell out the big bucks for animation packages such as Toons or Harmony or you look to the cheaper applications such as After Effects or Flash. More and more the industry is moving to these cheaper applications to do everything from TV animation to web. However these programs generally mean more complex workflows as well as longer production schedules.

Flash has a little known ability that allows those that know how, to program plug-ins to improve the workflow. In my search to save time at work I found this neat little plug-in for Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8 called the AnimSlider.

Warren Fuller developed AnimSlider; he has worked for many notable studios such as Wild Brain and Rhythm & Hues. The application, now in its 4th update, allows the animator the ability to target frames within a graphic by merely dragging a slider. The old, more laborious, way involved changing the number of the frame that you want to target in the Graphic Symbol’s properties panel. Warren also supplied a mechanism to allow for a symbol to handle a Graphic with multiple angles. Along with these functionalities, you also receive a plethora of other Flash Tools including a tool which develops an organized library, mirroring buttons, duplicate layers, as well as auto adjustments to your rotation point.

Overall the tool works really well and can improve your productivity on any flash animated project. However its real power is seen more with “puppeted” projects as opposed to traditional animation. In other words, it helps on projects that utilize lots of reusable elements. I found that it does not directly affect your animation files, rather it is solely a productivity tool, as a result, it does not detract or improve the SWF file size or performance. This tool only controls Graphic Symbols, not Movie Clip Symbols. I work in online game animation, and it has helped greatly with lip-synching. On average I can do about 30 seconds in a few minutes using the product, where as it used to take me almost an hour. The way the AnimSlider is configured makes it an indispensable asset for Flash Television animation. Because it does not use Movie Clips, all the animation can easily be output from Flash as an AVI or MOV file.

There are a few issues to keep in mind for Internet and game production. AnimSlider allows you to make a Pro Graphic Symbol in its pro-version, which lets you determine angles (such as side, ¾, and front). This is a wonderful asset for Video animation, but can be a hindrance for web. It has been proven that long embedded time lines in either Graphic Symbols as well as Movie Clips Symbols can affect file size, performance as well as the amount of time it takes to save the FLA adversely. I don’t foresee this being changed in the tool, though it is something to keep in mind if you final output is a SWF file instead of an AVI or MOV.

Overall I am very happy with the AnimSlider tool and am glad I purchased it. There are other tools like it, but none have as much “bang for the buck”.