Flash

Flash, an animation software product from Macromedia Inc., has emerged as the leading tool for creating interactive animations on the Web because of its ability to produce low-bandwidth, interactive animated images. Flash animations have grown tremendously popular in recent years, becoming the default standard after both Netscape and Microsoft agreed to include the Flash Player as a browser plug-in. The program uses the SWF (Shockwave Flash) file format to deliver graphics, animations, and accompanying sound.

Flash debuted in 1995 under its original name, FutureSplash Animator, and was purchased the following year from its producer, FutureWave, by computer-multimedia pioneer Macromedia. Renamed Flash, the product has outperformed even Macromedia's own animation format Shockwave in terms of popularity.

Flash is a vector-based Web animation format. Unlike bitmap graphics, which are produced pixel by pixel on the computer screen, vector graphics manipulate coordinates and mathematical formulas, defining images using lines and curves (or vectors) that describe the positions of various parts of an image as well as their color properties.

There are numerous advantages to using vector graphics rather than bitmaps. For example, an image can be moved, resized, and reshaped—and hence, animated—and its colors can be changed, all without losing any of the image's original quality. Vector images also are resolution-independent, which means that they can be displayed on computer monitors of varying display resolutions without loss of quality. It is not easy to edit bitmaps (although Flash does allow the importation of bitmaps into its animations), because they are resolution-dependent, and are drawn by modifying pixels instead of vectors. They also are fixed to a grid, the total size of which is predetermined by the artist. Bitmaps become compromised when they are resized, because pixels are redistributed around the grid.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of vector-based graphic formats like Flash is the fact that they produce [Page 191]images that use just one-tenth the bandwidth of bitmaps, and so can be transmitted to the Internet and received by standard dial-up modems without any particular loss of quality.

By now, Flash is all but ubiquitous on the Web. The program's inventor, Jonathan Gay, wrote in a January 2001 http://TechTV.com article that the format is present on the computers of 95 percent of Web users, somewhere between 250 million and 300 million people. It is frequently used by companies to build “first-screen” Web pages, with animated graphics that fall into place over the span of several seconds. Companies ranging from Disney to Microsoft and Pepsi have used Flash to add zip to their Web sites.

Flash is also among the most popular tools being adopted by a growing culture of Web animators, giving them the ability—without having to purchase many thousands of dollars of animation-rendering machinery—to turn their drawings into animated cartoons using only their computers and the appropriate Flash software. Some recognized filmmakers have even turned to the format to produce short subjects that they otherwise would probably never attempt. Director Tim Burton is a prime example, having produced a series of quirky Flash cartoons called Stainboy, which are available on the Web site of Macromedia spin-off http://Shockwave.com.

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