Comments on: What software should I use for this very simple animation?

Question: What software should I use for this very simple animation?

The Dutchman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:19:07 -0800

Flash? After effects? Maya? Toon Boom? Something else? I want to make some very simple abstract animation videos. The simplest would be just full screens of solid colors fading slowly into each other. Slightly more complex would be the same full screens of colors fading into each other, but not all at once. That is, maybe start the fade in the center or corner, and slowly leak in the new color. Or another slightly more complex: The screen divided into multiple blocks of different color that slowly fade into other colors. Real simple, slow, mellow stuff. So, what's the right software for that? Thanks!

By: mpls2

mpls2 — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:25:10 -0800

If you have a Mac, then Quartz Composer is pretty cool and easy to use (and you already have it).

By: The Dutchman

The Dutchman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:26:50 -0800

Oops. Should have said: PC with XP.

By: Xoder

Xoder — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:45:23 -0800

vvvv seems to be suited to this, in as much as it's a video pgramming language. But it also seems to be something of a sledgehammer for a penny nail...

By: Bakuun

Bakuun — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:50:58 -0800

Maya? For a color/alpha tween? That's definitely overkill :)

I'd just go with Flash. There are plenty of tutorials (and plenty of people who can help you out with specifics), it's a fairly easy program to get the hang of, and you can export to pretty much any video format without problems.

By: juv3nal

juv3nal — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:55:54 -0800

It's easy to do in flash, but there's probably a free way to do it if price is a concern (I don't know of any, but chances are one exists).

By: spaceman_spiff

spaceman_spiff — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:33:32 -0800

If you have any coding abilities whatsoever (seriously, really simple stuff), you could hack this up with imagemagick as a gif animation, or POV-Ray if you wanted to do something more complex like your second idea. Might be able to use OpenOffice Impress, even, since it exports to Flash though I'm not sure if you can set the background of a slide to change colors automatically.

Or Processing - it's a language designed to be easy for non-programmers to learn to do basic graphics stuff with. Haven't played with it myself, but I've heard you can get really spectacular results without a lot of work.

That said, if you have access to Flash, that's the easiest way to go; I'm just mentioning the others because they're free.

By: Dr. Curare

Dr. Curare — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:27:42 -0800

Processing. All the way. I write Actionscript for a living, have used flash to do stuff like what you want to do, and it is fairly easy, but if you want to play by the rules, flash costs several hundred dollars, processing is free.

By: Class Goat

Class Goat — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:26:48 -0800

What you're describing is ridiculously easy to do with Flash.

By: so_necessary

so_necessary — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:15:18 -0800

You could just use Windows Movie Maker (or other video editing software.) Make an image for each colour you want, then drag them into the timeline. Then add transition effects (e.g: fade)

By: revmitcz

revmitcz — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:34:58 -0800

As I understand it (though I haven't tried it), Adobe has a free open-source program called Flex that works much like Flash. There's ways to compile it and have it running on your local machine, but unfortunately you'll have to Google around about that cause I don't understand enough about it to explain it.

If you go the Flash route (grab the 30-day trial, since it's free) I would strongly recommend gotoAndLearn's tutorial on Tweener.

Color tweaking is much easier with AS 3 (actionscript version 3) than it was in previous versions, so most of these animations should be pretty easy to pull off with a little time investment.

By: The Dutchman

The Dutchman — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:34:13 -0800

Thanks everyone. Sounds like Flash is the way to go for me.