CS4

[crumb]

he could have been ignoring the question all together and just referring to his seadog ways.

[tyokio]

yarr, c; any ways.. got the trial a while back.. wrote a fairly large review about it too which I shall paste here.


"So I got the trial from the adobe website yesterday c:, opened the program up and it was... just wrong.. everything was, backwards. the tool bar was on the right and the time line was at the bottom. A quick switch around soon fixed that and I was on my way to working with it. The whole user interface of cvs4 kinda feels, dull. its all grey and plain and doesn’t really jump out at you. But this supposed to be a tool not something that looks good.

Overall thought of flash cs4. Slow.

just slow, opening Rat2 in flash cs4 really showed the difference in speed, cs3 opened the file in 1 second (half a second with information stored in ram). Cs4 took 20 seconds to open the file which was 59mb (8 seconds with information stored in ram) which is quite a marginal difference.

Scene menu

In its problems there are some parts that are just brilliant... one thing which really means something to me and others who've been with flash since 5 and beyond is the scene menu fix. Before, if you have several scenes and you selected a scene right at the bottom the menu would skip right back to the top each time. It used to annoy the hell out of me if I was going through each scene colouring stuff. Flash cs4 has fixed the problem, it was the first thing I wanted to check.

New tools

Of course I had to check out the bone tool too.. its pretty straight forward really, movie clips on the same layer, a new layer represents the biped and away you go. Bipeds are a little harder to do as you seem to have to mess with the arrangement of the movie clips in the correct way in order for it to move properly.

The 3d tools are pretty cool too, I see applications in frame by frame animation if you wanted to create a feeling of perspective, but not for much else. As for filters you still have the same ones from flash 8 but for animation do you really need any more filters then that?


Tweens tweens tweeeny tweens

There really isn’t anything new for us frame by frame animators in this program, the only ones which will really get a kick out of the cs4 additions is the tween animators who will have a greater control over tweening (or so the adverts say) the motion editor looks mad though, you move a point on "y" and it just shoots down the screen, its quite sensitive really. looks very much like the motion editor on Maya except I kind of have a sense of what is going on in this version of the menu. I do however like the new tween system.. its just... brilliant. no more f6ing for me : D (technically you didn’t have to press it any way though) but altering the motion path (out side of the motion menu) is just so simple now. I don’t use tweens much any way but this is a real step forward for flash.

Overall

Overall its half disappointing because of Its slowness, and its layout being really different to the old layout, but layout is something one gets used to in time... even if it fills you with rage. and also ifs half not disappointing because of the new toys you get to play with such as the new tools and the new tween system. I think its a reasonable program, I just don’t understand why its so slow!.

oh and the good old fashioned fill problem still seems to be there too! the one where you'd fill something in and the whole thing would either disappear of a section of the drawing would turn black. oh well... nice try Adobe. Saying that I’m really not in a position to give an opinion just yet on flash cs4... I’ve only been able to play with it for a couple of hours!."



the new tween system rocks and I like how you move an object you get a more awsome ghost image if where it was, I just dont see myself going for it though... no matter how taunting the scene menu is in the previous versions haha.