Studio 8: The Next Generation Part I

 
Jul 30, 2005

by Judith Dinowitz

A few weeks ago, Michael and I sat down with some of Macromedia's product managers and had a briefing on their next release of Studio, announced today, August 8 (8/8 at 8 am was how they coined it.) For people that do not really use Flash or Dreamweaver, we were very impressed with what we saw. (We were so impressed that when we got our review packets, Michael actually started using Dreamweaver.)

Jim Guerard, Macromedia's Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing, started our briefing with an update on the company. He said that in June, Macromedia finished up a great fiscal year, with record revenue. Macromedia is continuing to meet its goal of a 20% increase in growth from year to year. With the announced upcoming acquisition with Adobe, Guerard said he sees limitless opportunities ahead. "If you think about it, there are four core mediums of communication: Print, Digital Imaging and video, the Web, and Cellphones and Mobile devices. Once the acquisition goes through, we're going to have the world's leading tools for creating and deploying content to all those four mediums under one roof."

That's the future, and that's all that Guerard can really say right now about the acquisition. He refuses to speculate on what changes will be made to Macromedia's product line. However, he and the other product managers are eager to talk about the new Studio 8, which features a new version of the Flash player that will fundamentally redefine what we're capable of on the Web:

  • Flash Player 8 contains a brand new Video Codec, which dramatically improves the quality and capabilities of online video.
  • It features new technology for text rendering and font display.
  • It has graphics capabilities that were not before available on the web, such as real-time compositing.
  • Macromedia has dramatically increased the performance of the player and the runtime environment.

Another plus: Macromedia has added new technology for auto-updating and inline information, which will really accelerate the adoption of the player. The current adoption rate of the player is 80% ubiquity within 12 months. Macromedia fully expects this to get even shorter with this release of the player. (Note: Auto-update is available only on Windows platforms, while Express Install is available on both Mac and Windows. Express Install is a part of the new Flash Player detection kit, included with the authoring tool, which loads a SWF file from macromedia.com at run-time and allows for transparent install of the new Player.)

Guerard stressed that this release is the most customer-driven release they've had yet. Each product team consulted with 40 different customers on the web throughout the development process. Based on these discussions, Macromedia made certain changes in the product:

  1. Customers said the differentiation between Studio with Flash Basic vs. Studio with Flash Professional was confusing. Therefore, there is only one flavor of Studio currently, which includes Flash Professional. Flash Basic is a cut-down version of the product designed for the occasional or casual Flash user, without some of the advanced features of Professional such as the new Graphic Effects filters, blend modes, video features, advanced animation, custom anti-aliasing, stand-alone video encoder, and a variety of other features.
  2. Freehand has been taken out of the product, while Contribute 3 and Flashpaper 2 have been added. Macromedia found that a lot of their users spend a large amount of time doing maintenance work, administrating and updating their websites, and tools like Contribute and Flashpaper really add to the efficiency of these day-to-day, mundane tasks. Freehand is not being discontinued, but will continue to be developed, supported and sold as a standalone product.
  3. Captivate was not included in Studio because it is currently a Windows-only product and Studio has to be multi-platform.

Customer feedback also determined some of the focus of the product:
  • The success of Flash Video in the last year created a need for many of the new features in Studio 8 that are specifically designed to meet the needs of video professionals. Besides the aforementioned Video Codec, there are new capabilities in both Flash and Dreamweaver for authoring video. Also, Studio and Flash Professional both come with a video encoder that can be installed on a separate machine. This will allow Video professionals to create video on a machine that doesn't contain Flash 8 or Studio 8. This is a big help to video professionals, who frequently use a separate machine just to encode their videos.
  • There are new features and functionality in Flash professional for developing and authoring mobile content.
  • Macromedia has focused on making Studio 8:
    1. Essential -- the essential software for doing great experiences online.
    2. Expressive - containing new creative capabilities and functionality that allow people to do things they fundamentally couldn't do before.
    3. Efficient -- designed to help customers with their workflow within products, between products and across products. This allows people to do now in seconds what used to take hours.
    4. Everywhere - allowing customers to do what they want on the platform they want.

Flash 8

Mike Downey, Flash Product Manager, showed off some of the new special effects that are now possible with Flash:

Graphic Effect or Filters

Figure 1: The Dancing Monkey Demo

Macromedia has rearchitected the core rendering engine in the Flash Player to optimize performance, and inserted a new set of APIs for image-level control. This is the first version of Flash to have pixel-level control over graphics, not just vector-level control. Macromedia then abstracted a series of filters to give "out of the box" special effects, such as blur, drop shadow and glow. These effects are rendered at runtime and therefore don't increase the size of the Flash file! Downey showed an example of how the user could change the look of a simple animation (a dancing monkey, shown in Figure 1 above) by adding or changing filter options in the player. The properties of the animation were adjusted live in the player, and the changes happened on the spot! There was no noticeable hit on the speed of the animation, though Downey took it through many changes and added several filters at a time. A full API is available in ActionScript, enabling developers to create other unique effects.

The next demonstrations Downey gave centered on a fictitious Museum of modern art called the Experience Museum. Instead of creating a full graphic with a drop shadow in Fireworks, he placed an image of a painting on the wall of the museum and added a drop shadow filter. The drop shadow was rendered in runtime, thus keeping the size of his image file (and his SWF file) small.

Downey showed us another use of these filters. First he placed a "sculpture" image on the museum floor and animated it with a rotating filter. Then he added a second, identical image with a drop shadow at a slightly different angle. By hiding the second image while keeping the drop shadow effect visible, he was able to simulate a shadow of the original sculpture. This, too, can be animated in time with the original sculpture.


Figure 2: Studio 8's new filters can simulate finer and more subtle animations than its predecessors, like this use of two identical objects with the second object hidden and its effect visible.

Blend Mode:

Figure 3: The picture on the left was inserted into the Flash movie and then blended, to produce the picture on the right.
Macromedia has introduced Blend mode to Flash, which allows two bit maps to be composited and blended together. For example, Downey took an image with a white border which didn't work with the background image. He converted the image to a movie clip and changed the properties of the border to blend more into the background. There are several blend filters, such as Difference (which takes the difference between the two colors as the final color.)

Shape Drawing and Vector Rendering:

Flash has always had a subset of the capabilities you would get in Freehand or Adobe Illustrator. For example, Downey explained, the ability to add caps and joins on a stroke has now been incorporated into Flash. In previous versions of Flash, every stroke was rounded. Now you can make a mitered join (which means you can square off the joints between two strokes) or a shape can be perfectly squared off. These are the fine points that excite the designer community.

Radial Gradiants and Velocity Curves

In previous versions of Flash, you could move the center point of a radial gradiant. (A radial gradiant is an optional type of gradiant fill that fills out and around the radius of a shape, as the figure below illustrates. In Flash 8, you can now change the direction of a center point, not just move it, which can be used to change the direction of the lighting in lighting effects. In addition, Flash Professional now gives animators the opportunity to create a velocity curve, which controls the speed of the animation and the direction anywhere along the curve. They can also have a different velocity curve for each property of an animation, such as the rotation or the color of an image.


Figure 4: Finer manipulation of the center point of the radial gradiant (shown above) is now possible in Flash 8.

Figure 5: Velocity curves, such as the one above, can be used to control the velocity of the animation, or of individual properties of the animation.

Quality User Experiences

Downey said that in order to provide a better user experience, the Flash tool was given a major performance overhaul. Like the player, the tool is now dramatically faster than it was in the last release.

Flash Type: The New Font-Rendering Engine

Flash Type, the new font-rendering engine, makes the text in Flash crisper and cleaner. Downey claims that Flash Type fonts are as good as cleartype, the current industry standard. He showed us an example of the new type and compared it to the old engine's type. The old letters were grayer and more pixilated, while the new type is clearer and crisper, and contains multiple colors.


Figure 6: A selection of the new FlashType letters. The letters on the lower left are magnified and the color pixels that lend the type its crispness can be clearly seen.

Cache as Bitmap

At runtime, Flash Player 8 can cache a vector as a bitmap. The image is then held in memory and the Player can animate the image without having to constantly redraw the vectors. In previous versions, as the number of vectors increased, the animation would slow down dramatically. One can also uncache and recache the image at different points, creating custom effects. The Cache as Bitmap feature should add a lot of speed to Flash animations.

Video:

For the Flash Professional 8 release, Macromedia did extensive testing with video professionals who had never used the Flash tool before. They asked these users to put video in their Flash document to see how and whether they could figure it out. Macromedia discovered that they needed to consolidate all of the uses of Video in Flash into one interface. "What you may not know," said Downey, "is that there are about five different ways to deploy video in Flash. Prior to this release, each method used a different interface. Having someone new figure that out was nearly impossible."

The new Video workflow has you choose from a number of different options for the type of file you're importing and the type of deployment (progressive download, streaming with a hosted "Flash Video Streaming Service" (FVSS) account, streaming through your own Flash Communication Server, and embedded in a SWF file). Downey recommended progressive download as the most common way to do high-quality video in Flash, if you don't have access to a streaming server. For serving up large numbers of videos on high-traffic sites, streaming is better. He advised us to stay away, for the most part, from the embedded video option. He said to distribute a video on CD, one would put the SWF and FLV files on the CD. The user would launch the SWF file, which would pull the FLV up as a progressive download.

Once the file format and deployment options are selected, and if your original file format was not Flash, Flash will take you to an encoding screen. There, you'll be asked to choose whether you'd like the video to be encoded with the old Codec or the new Codec. With the new video codec, users can get as much as twice the quality with the same file size when compared to the old codec.

Cue Points

Flash Professional 8 also gives an option to insert cue points in your video that would spawn new events or navigation options. Navigation-based cue points let you shift to a specific frame in the video. For example, one could have a thumbnail next to a video that's playing, and when the user clicks on the thumbnail, he or she would be brought to a specific point in the video. Event-based cue points cause some event to happen rather than shifting the user in time. For example, one could have titles or captioning come up on the screen overlaying the video. The encoder inserts a key-frame for each navigation-based cue point; each key frame does increase the size of your file, which is why people may prefer event-based cue points. Another example of an event-based cue point is a Flash application that would present the user with a "juke box" of videos, where pressing on a cue point in the Flash file will load up a different video. Michael Dinowitz suggested having an interactive video novel, where pressing on specific cue points in one video will spawn off a different video. Downey said that the website for the movie The Bourne Supremacy has an interactive Flash movie trailer where the video starts playing and then the screen goes dark, and the user can navigate around the room and interact with different objects. For example, a visitor might pick up the pencil and pad and scrape the pencil across the pad to uncover what was last written there. At a certain point, the video starts up again.

Skinning

The video workflow then asks you to choose a skin for your video, which includes navigation buttons, colors, and the shape and style of the skin. There are pre-defined skins that come with Flash, or the user can customize his own. Once the skin is chosen, the Flash video is configured, encoded and ready to be inserted. Flash even automatically sizes the video to fit the source video size.

Alpha Channels

Downey said that Flash video now supports alpha channels in video. He showed us a video with a woman walking through a gallery. The woman was recorded against a green screen, and the green was keyed out in Adobe AfterEffects. Then a transparent background was encoded. The background video was changed so that you could put text behind the woman, or different background image, and the walls of the gallery seemed to mutate as the woman walked through.

Alpha channels allow video professionals to place one video on top of another, add effects like water to their video, or insert some of the graphical filters, like the blur and drop shadow effects, into the alpha channel. Michael Dinowitz gave an example of creating a video using Star Trek footage and superimposing an image of a fan on the older video, letting the fan be part of the Star Trek experience.

To Be Continued ...

This is just the Flash side of things, which is only one part (though an impressive one) of the entire Studio package. Stay tuned for Part II, which will focus on Dreamweaver and more of what Studio 8 brings to the table.

Meanwhile, here are some links about Studio 8 and Flash Professional 8:

Studio 8 Home Page

Features of Flash Professional 8

Macromedia Announces Studio 8

Macromedia Announces Dreamweaver 8

Macromedia Announces Flash Professional 8

Macromedia Announces Fireworks 8

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