Flash was a great animation tool, a refusal to change left it as a relic of the past
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Flash
It's used primarily as a tool for making ad banners if the kilobyte count is fairly high, otherwise it's used on computers where we don't have a license of ToonBoom Harmony for animation. Harmony is an expensive program and most of the computers here have a license for Adobe Creative Suite so Flash/Animate are fine programs in a pinch but ideally we want something with nicer drawing tools. Usually we get the rough drawings and timing figured out in Flash and then do animation clean-up within Photoshop's timeline tools if Harmony is not available.
Pros
- Easy to learn and get started in.
- Versatile, it plays nicely between all the programs in the Adobe Suite.
- A safe environment to learn how to program a game.
Cons
- Drawing tools!! The lines in the brush just look pretty ugly. It would be nice if there was a way to choose between optimizing Flash for online export and to use for video pieces.
- Program can be unstable and can slow down if you aren't mindful of how you are using it.
- Many glitches in the program are still present ever since I first started using it nearly 10 years ago.
- It's good, mostly just use it because it's included in the Adobe Creative Suite but generally not the reason for buying the program. AfterEffects and Photoshop are the main contenders.
- It was very useful when I first graduated from college in the early 2010s, now most studios moved on to Harmony.
- Got my first job from Flash, so I am thankful for it.
ToonBoom Harmony has a lot of the compositing stuff from AfterEffects built in and it has much stronger rigging tools than Flash. It's great because it lets you do a mix between both puppeted and animation that is tweaked by hand. However documentation on how to use the program is extremely limited. Photoshop solves a lot of the issues I have with Flash's drawing tools but the actual timeline controls are pretty weak.
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