Type treatment...your thoughts?
by Anthony Proctor
on
Sep 27, 2005 at 2:46:56 pm
Greetings all:
This is a semi-rhetorical post, more to get people's thoughts on the subject of type treatment in Flash than anything else. Just so you know...I'm an old Director guy who's clawed his way to an intermediate understanding of Flash, so my limited knowledge of said dev tool is likely lurking 'neath the surface. In advance, I beg your forgiveness of my naivte. Please be gentle. I bruise easily.
That said, I'm very disappointed with Flash's handling of type treatment. My business partner is the After Effects guy in our small shop, and he has a plethora of type treatment tools at his fingertips. In fact, he, in his non-Flash world, doesn't understand why the type treatment is so weak in Flash, given it's power in other areas. To that end, I'm hoping that After Effects and Flash will meld into a super-animation behemoth that will allow me to quickly and easily lay an effect on a text element.
Yes, I'm aware of third-party standalone programs such as Swish (which is PC-based and pretty much out of the running) and TextOsterone, and I've played around with a couple of third-party "plugins", but they all seem, frankly, clunky and more trouble than they're worth. Well, that's not really fair, they generally are worth the trouble, 'cause I love a good text effect. I guess I just think it should be easier.
So there lies the food for discussion: what are your thoughts? Am I just whining about what everyone else knows to be the cold, hard truth about Flash? What do *you* use for cool text effects? Anything at all? Can we expect Adobe to save the day? Or will the Third Party Plugin People survive? Will Kimberly realize Brad is really the father of her child before she marries Chase?
Re: Type treatment...your thoughts? by LeeBrimelow on Sep 27, 2005 at 5:13:08 pm
One great way to do text animations for Flash is to do them in After Effects. You can export the animations as vectors for use in Flash. Check out the After Effects & Flash tutorial I did here at the Cow. I would also bet that After Effects and Flash will be tightly integrated in the future. Perhaps not as one application but I'm sure you'll be able to do motion graphics in AE for use in Flash.
Also as far as text in Flash, Flash 8 has an awesome new text renderer which makes text much more readable and less blurry.
Re: Type treatment...your thoughts? by Anthony Proctor on Sep 27, 2005 at 7:52:38 pm
Thanks, Lee. As always, your tutorials are simply superb. Had I known AE could export to SWF, I probably never would've posted my post. Then again, I never really used AE at all - at least, I didn't until now - so I never really looked closely at the Export menu. But now, hello keyframes of a different flavor!
Now if we can only figure out a way to vectorize motion blur from AE...
Re: Type treatment...your thoughts? by LeeBrimelow on Sep 27, 2005 at 8:52:18 pm
Glad you liked the tutorial. In Flash 8 we can now apply blur on movieclips. So if you import your AE text animation SWF into a movieclip, you can then blur it to create motion blur.
