New Features in Flash CS4

With the recent release of Flash CS4, I’d thought I’d cover some of the highlights of the new features.

Interface
The user interface has been overhauled to match all of the adobe creative suite tools. It may take some users a little while to get used to it, but it seems to be for the better.

Tweening Engine
The timeline’s tweening engine now supports object-based animation with motion tweening. What this means is that you do not have to create a new keyframe, modify your symbol then create the motion tween (“Create Classic Tween”).

All you have to do now is create your symbol and then add a motion tween to that object. The containing layer becomes a “tween layer” which has a unique layer icon and ending keyframe (diamond). The motion tween includes a motion guide giving you full control of the animation itself (even with the free transform tool).

Motion Editor
The Motion Editor gives you a graph of all the properties of your object (symbol). This allows for a great overview of your animation properties (rotation, easing, etc) and allows for fine-tune control. A neat feature is the added options of Easing for each of the animation properties.

Motion Preset
You can save any of your animations as a “Motion Preset” and can use many of the predefined Default Preset animations on any object (can be used like a library of animations).

3D Support
3D support is now available and allows animators to create cool 3D effects with two new tools in the toolbox: 3D Rotation Tool and 3D Translation Tool. The 3D Translation Tool allows moving an object (symbol) in the x, y and z axis.

Bones – kinematics
The new “Bones” feature is a new tool in the toolbox (Bone) that allows you to create animated objects that behave like a skeleton. So you can have many symbols that together follow the same “bone structure”. A neat use for this would also be applying a bone structure to a solid shape which would give it a cool shape tween effect. This would be almost impossible to do in previous versions of Flash.

Adobe Media Encoder
Adobe changed the name of the Flash Video Encoder to Adobe media Encoder because it is capable of encoding a lot of different types of files. You can still import video files like you normally did in Flash (Import -> Import Video) and go through that wizard to convert it to FLV/F4V formats.

The encoder gives you options for the type of codec, bitrate, frame rate, batch encoding, etc. Check oout this video to learn more.

Project Panel
The new Project Panel (acquired from gskinner.com) allows developers to easily create new .fla and .as (class) files. Class files can now have fully customizable starter code created for them as well.