April 12, 2006

Slick After Effects->Flash integration

I'm delighted to see that Drew Trujillo (aka Dr. Woohoo) has released a pair of tools for moving After Effects keyframe data into Flash. Along with a free AE export script, Drew has created After Effects 2 Flash-Transform Properties, a Flash extension that smooths the importing of AE data. You can read more about the tools on his blog. (Note: My role in this is kindly overstated; in fact I just helped people smarter than myself get connected--which, for what it's worth, is what a lot of product management boils down to.)

This kind of integration is, I think, the start of much great progress to come. Back in 1999, when I first heard that Adobe was thinking of making a Web animation tool, I started lobbying my contacts at Adobe & Macromedia for a "Flash Interchange Format" that would enable Flash, AE, and other applications to exchange data with layers, keyframes, object names, and other data intact. The timing wasn't right, of course, but now that the companies have come together, the opportunities to collaborate are incredible. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, give these tools a shot.

(More on Drew's work can be found here.)

[Update: I realized I'd inverted the title. It's now revised to indicate the direction of integration: AE into Flash.]

Posted by John Nack at 02:55 PM on April 12, 2006

Comments

smick — 05:42 AM on April 13, 2006

What versions of AE does this work for? [6.5 and 7.0. The Flash component requires MX04 or 8.0. --J.]

freda — 01:14 AM on January 15, 2007

I have used the software-All-into-One FLASH Mixer( http://www.qweas.com/download/video_dvd/flash_tools/all_into_one_flash_mixer.htm) which can join several swf onto a new swf, and join picture files and text into a single swf file by dragging and dropping.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Remember Me?