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Edit Review — Macromedia Studio 8

Dec 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Frank McMahon

Improved drawing tools, better blend modes, and the addition of Flash video mark this update.

The merger with Adobe has not diminished the push for advanced software from Macromedia. The division has created one of its biggest updates yet in Studio 8, with a range of new features. The suite contains Flash Professional 8, Dreamweaver 8, and Fireworks 8, as well as Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. Macromedia Freehand is not around this time, but the company is reportedly still going to keep it on a development cycle.

Much of the cool stuff is in the new Flash Professional 8, especially for animators and designers. This time around, rather than focusing on scripting, most of the new features are geared toward digital content producers.

Many drawing tools have been updated; strokes can now be joined easily, and you have more options to cap the ends of them. You can directly apply gradients to strokes with a single click, and one of the neatest new features is the ability to adjust the overflow of the gradient, exactly positioning where the flow of colors will go on your object. Gradients now support 16 points for more detail.

There is a new undo feature that allows setting undo on a document or object-based track. With the normal document undo, as in most programs, you just backtrack all your steps. But with object-based undo you can make several changes to a circle, for example, and then when you are done click on a square and make several alterations. Now when you click back on the circle and hit undo, the program will backtrack through all your circle changes, leaving the square unaltered. Unless you click on the square, then you can backtrack through those changes. This is a powerful feature, but one that takes getting used to. It may help animators to work more efficiently, but be ready for a bit of rethinking about how you use the program.

Libraries are improved in Flash 8. You can now have multiple projects open and switch among their associated libraries. You can drag an object or movie clip from one project to another project. As a matter of fact, you can tear off library windows and create floating palettes of your objects, buttons, and clips for added flexibility.

One of the new features I love is the new ease in, ease out graph. Sure, you could always do easing in on previous versions, but it was a little trickier and not as intuitive to expertly fine-tune. Now you have a graph you can easily use to add control points and make the ease nicely arc for butter-smooth slowdowns and speedups.

New antialiased text modes dramatically improve the readability of fonts in your projects at small point sizes. There are also blend modes than can be applied to objects. These work pretty much the same as they do in a program such as Photoshop CS. Also new are filters such as blur, bevel, drop shadow, and others. This may not sound like big news, but anyone who has ever animated in Flash knows that to even do a simple drop shadow takes “faking it” in the program or doing it as a bitmap and importing. No more. Now you can do many of these effects in realtime right from within the program.

Ah, Flash video! OK, this is the biggest new feature. It's now easier than ever to incorporate video into your Flash movies. There is full support for alpha channels, meaning, for example, you can now drop out the background of your video and have just talent walking around and chit-chatting, with everything else keyed out.

Previous versions of Flash used the Sorenson Spark codec, which was fine, but the new one really blows it away. It's called On2, and it does a fantastic job of making your video look sharp and clear. The catch is that if you are going to use the new codec, your audience is going to need the new Flash 8 player. But as people upgrade we'll see more On2 compressed clips that will look better and better.

You can now have cue points added to your video, so you can trigger Flash events with ActionScript while your movie plays. And don't worry about drawing a video player interface from scratch, Flash 8 now ships with several built in. All are just one click away.

The updated Macromedia Studio 8 package also includes Fireworks 8 and Dreamweaver.

Fireworks 8 allows creating pop-up web menus in CSS format and adds new slicing options for improved exporting of bitmaps. Macromedia has also added 25 new blend modes to the program, as well as some new shadows, including perspective shadow and solid shadow.

Dreamweaver 8 has added a bunch of new options, including guides — finally. I am not sure how we've gone so many updates without it, but yes, now you can slide out a horizontal or vertical guide for much better alignment and placement. A new style rendering toolbar has been added. CSS support has been improved, including better ways to visually lay out your Cascading Style Sheets. If you love to dive into XML, you can work with it more visually in this new version, as opposed to the old fashioned text modes.

Studio 8 is a powerhouse of animation and web development, but I would like to see some tweaks. I really wish Dreamweaver acted more like a design tool, as do programs like Netobjects Fusion and Adobe GoLive. It's a hard-core coder tool that has received lots of usability gloss for creative artists over the past few versions, but I would love a mode where I can just start dragging and dropping in text and images, and not have to worry about creating cells and aligning frames.

Though dramatically improved, Flash still clings a little to its non-intuitive roots. The program works differently from most timeline animators, so there is a learning curve to tackle. The good news is the power stuff used to require ActionScript, but now you can do tons of cool stuff and never look at code.

To me, the most exciting aspect of this first-rate package is the ease of getting video into Flash and exporting to your animations. This literally takes a couple of clicks, and then you have full-motion video running with full controls. Even if you did nothing with the package besides move your video to the Web (don't forget the creative options alpha channels can bring), you would be able to do some amazingly professional-looking streaming work that is more compatible with browsers than the output from any other program out there.

The package as a whole is a great deal considering all you get: web development, animation, and bitmap/vector creation. Macromedia has once again raised the bar, leaving little doubt about who will be ruling the web world in the coming years.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Adobe Macromedia
San Francisco; (415) 832-2000

Website: www.macromedia.com

Product: Studio 8

Assets: Import of video into Flash movies, many feature improvements for Flash.

Caveats: Dreamweaver interface is fairly non-intuitive.

Demographic: Web designers, animators, anyone outputting Flash animation for the Web.
Price: $999

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.