I've had a couple flash projects in the back of my mind, domains bought for a couple years, spent a day or 2 going through tutorials... But like many, I recognized how much of a learning curve there would be and shelved it over and over. Recent versions of Adobe Premier Pro have an export to flash feature. I have an old version (6 I think) and I'm pretty comfortable with using it. I could do most of what I have in mind in Premier Pro, though I guess I'll be giving up a lot of Flash effects and abilities. Basically what I want to do is create a voice audio track, pop in different character images and manipulate the mouth when they are talking. I realize this sounds clunky and there are much smoother, lower bandwidth ways to do it in flash...but I could just overlay different or resized mouths over the image at the right audio points, and create my own quirky form of animation. So, before I go and upgrade to Adobe Premier Pro CS4, tell me how stupid I am. or at least throw out a few pros and cons.
This sort of thing is what AfterEffects was designed to do, if you're planned output is video instead of vector animation. I would recommend checking out JahShaka, it's an open-source video compositor. I don't have much experience with it, but from what I understand of it this seems to be in line with what you're after. Hope this helps!
I'm wondering what sort of bandwidth savings I can get exporting flash video from premier pro? What I will be doing will be mostly static images that I move around a bit and play with in the timeline, so I'm wondering if the exporter is smart enough to convert those images to objects or whatever the term is. Maybe I should just make one to see if can even pull off what I want to do. If I can create decent video I could always go the youtube route...I just like the cleaner look and bandwidth savings of self hosted flash files.
JahShaka does look like a better tool to do these things in video. But just looking at it, if I'm going to take time to learn that program, I may as well dive into adobe flash. I'm just not sure I want to make that this months big project. But if I can get decent results with what I already know... maybe. Then again, since JahShaka is free I suppose I could take a couple hours to play with it and see what happens.
um, there would be BIG bandwidth savings if the animation was done in vector with an audio track, and saved as SVG, and if it's 100% vector it's 100% quality, and resolution-less because it can be scaled to any size. Versus video, which can be tricky to find a balance between quality and size. I have flash, and I recommend it for this sort of thing. I don't use Premiere, but if you are at all familiar wih Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator you should feel at home with Flash because it is built including the same tools, and built according to the same design principles. I have seen Jahshaka used professionally successfully in the past, I know they have gone through some leadership issues and am currently unaware of the state of things there lately.