Subject:Flash suggestion for Acid Pro

Posted by: feign

Date:4/28/2006 6:59:58 PM

I am an animation producer, not a musician, so I'm coming from a different point of view here. Among other things, I produce a large number of short Flash animations. When I discovered Acid Pro a year ago I instantly fell in love. It is far and away the best tool to create and mix soundtracks for short animations. And Acid Pro 6 makes my jaw drop. It is better than ever for my purposes, particularly the inline MIDI editing. Fantastic! But there is one major flaw in the process:

Acid can only import Flash animations in Flash 5 format. Considering that Flash is now up to version 8 and no one is producing in Flash 5 format anymore, the Flash import function in Acid is basically useless. Most current Flash projects cannot be saved in Flash 5 format for various reasons. And, due to a limitation in Flash, they also can't be exported properly as Quicktime or AVI.

So the only way to properly produce a soundtrack in Acid for a Flash project is to write a timing sheet based on the Flash project, then plan out the soundtrack in Acid based on the timing sheet, without actually seeing the animation while doing it. Then render the Acid project into WAV, import into Flash, note the changes needed, go back to Acid and tweak it, render it again, etc. It is an inefficient and often inaccurate way to work.

If the creators of Acid Pro would take the trouble to update the Flash engine to enable import of Flash 6, 7 or 8 format movies, I tell you that Acid Pro would become a completely essential purchase for thousands of Flash animation producers. I already highly recommend it to all my colleagues, but with improved Flash import, I would sing its praises from the mountaintop. It would sell to a potentially sizable new market.

Subject:RE: Flash suggestion for Acid Pro

Reply by: alltheseworlds

Date:4/30/2006 8:44:45 AM

Agree. Import of higher Flash version would be fantastic. As you point out, stopping at version 5 is almost useless.

Subject:RE: Flash suggestion for Acid Pro

Reply by: Spectralis

Date:4/30/2006 9:06:08 AM

It's good that people are raising these issues because it will make ACID 6 much more compatible with other formats. Is there any reason why it might be difficult to update the Flash import? If not, then I don't know why Sony can't introduce it in the next update.

Subject:RE: Flash suggestion for Acid Pro

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:5/1/2006 8:13:11 AM

> Is there any reason why it might be difficult to update the Flash import?

I don’t know but maybe it has something to do with licensing. If Flash import only affects a small number of customers but the license is so expensive that it would unduly increase the cost of your product for everyone, then it might not make good business sense.

~jr

Subject:RE: Flash suggestion for Acid Pro

Reply by: alltheseworlds

Date:5/1/2006 9:02:41 AM

Don;t think so. There's dozens of one-person operations that import and especially export in Flash format...