Flash MX vs. LiveMotion 2

Dust off your tux, get in touch with your bookie, put in a call to the escort service, and have Jeeves gas up the limo, because it's fight night! And tonight, we have the matchup that many of us have literally been waiting days, or possibly even weeks, for. Let's turn it over to our ring announcer for the introductions:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, please direct your attention to the challenger in the blue corner. Weighing in at an introductory price of $199 until May 7, after which time it'll balloon up to $399, from San Jose, California, The Assassin from Adobe, LIVE MOTION TWWWWOOOOOO!!!!!

And in the red corner, weighing in at an even $499, the reigning heavyweight champion of web animation, from San Francisco, California, Macromedia's Master of Disaster, the Viceroy of Vectors, the Admiral of ActionScript, FLASH EMMMM EXXXXX!!!!!

Ladies and Gentlemen...

Let's get READY to RUMBLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!"

Thank you, Michael Buffer. I'll tell you, Stu, LiveMotion has really bulked itself up since we last saw it in action, adding more complete scripting capabilities and Flash 5 support, and it looks to be in real fighting shape. But Flash hasn't exactly been an idle champion! It's been putting in some serious time at the gym, and appears to have given itself a complete interface overhaul and packed on some features that developers have been pleading for. And what's more, there is absolutely no love lost between the makers of these two stalwart programs. This has all the makings of an epic battle! The combatants are headed to the center of the square circle, where referee Mills Lane will explain the rules:

"All right, gentlemen. I want a good, clean fight. This bout is scheduled for three rounds. When the bell sounds for round one, you will only be allowed to use your animation features. In round two, I want you to come out swinging with your interactivity and scripting. In the third round, anything goes! Now touch gloves, go back to your corners, and wait for the bell. Let's get it on!"

All right, the fighters are set, and we're just waiting for the opening bell! The atmosphere is absolutely electric in here!

<DING>

OK, enough with the boxing stuff. To be quite frank, I don't think I could have kept that up throughout the length of this piece without driving myself insane, and honestly, it probably would have been quite painful to read. In fact, I congratulate you for making it even this far. So I'll stop pretending that I'm talking to Stu Nahan and just get on with it. From this point on, we're going to do a civilized feature comparison to see which web animation tool is worth sinking your hard-earned dough into. Sound good? Thought so.

Programs like Flash and LiveMotion are strange animals because they have enough stuff packed in them to be equally useful to designers and programmers alike. With that in mind, we're going to pit them against each other in a few core areas. In the first round of our showdown, we'll see which program is better for all those right-brainers out there who just need a versatile animation tool. In the second round, the left-brainers get a go, and we'll find out which one delivers the goods in terms of interactivity and scripting. In the third and final round, we'll touch on the intangibles. Then, hopefully, we can declare a winner.

Round 1: Animation

Timeline
Really, the concept of animation here is pretty simple. Take some shapes, change them over time, and adjust as necessary to make way-cool, compact, web-ready animations. So how did that seemingly simple concept get to be so thoroughly bastardized in Flash 5? And why was the same concept such a strength for the original version of LiveMotion? Three words: timeline, timeline, timeline. The timeline was LiveMotion 1's great strength and Flash 5's great weakness. Yet many of us muddled through with Flash 5 in spite of its horrid timeline because we needed full-fledged interactivity as well. But with Flash MX, I have to say that the Flash timeline is one of the most improved features from one version to the next that I've seen in any software program, period. Frame selection is intuitive, sequence re-timing is greatly improved, and things just behave the way they should have all along, which makes Flash MX so much nicer to work with than Flash 5 (fig 1). While Flash remains a frame-based timeline, the fact that it's a heck of a lot easier to work with makes that fact much less of a liability.

Figure 1: Double-clicking a tweened frame selects the tweened frames in Flash MX, instead of popping up the Actions panel like in Flash 5.

However, LiveMotion's timeline is pretty strong as well. Based on the After Effects timeline, LiveMotion uses a familiar time-based rather than frame-based model (fig 2). There are two main advantages to this: one, familiarity, and two, you can change the frame rate of an animation without changing the overall running time. Changing animations is as simple as dragging keyframes across the timeline, which makes the inevitable tweaking process pretty painless. I would like to see parameter controls integrated more directly into the timeline (fig 3), as well as the ability to go higher than 40 fps, but overall LiveMotion 2 gets the slight edge for animation ease, even though Flash MX has made it an almost dead heat.

Figure 2: LiveMotion 2's time-based timeline.

Figure 3: Uh, I can set the keyframes, but why can't I set the opacity level right here in LM2? Too used to After Effects, I reckon.

Integration
Personally, I prefer using Illustrator over the built-in drawing tools of either program to do my vector drawing, so naturally I'm curious how each contender integrates with Illustrator (and other imaging programs like Photoshop, for that matter). I really expected LiveMotion to have a leg up here, but the "tight integration" LiveMotion boasts with other Adobe apps really doesn't go as far as I thought it would. Sure, it's nice to be able to import (or "place," in the LiveMotion vernacular) a native Illustrator 10 file in LiveMotion. But crucial things like layers aren't retained by default, so you still have to break apart the image and place the individual elements in their own layers once you get into LiveMotion. A largely automated process, but hardly the integration I expected, especially now that Flash MX can do the same thing in the form of the Distribute to Layers command. In fact, I actually found that Flash MX has more options for importing Illustrator files than LiveMotion does. You can copy and paste from Illustrator to both programs. You can drag and drop from Illustrator to both programs. You can import Illustrator files directly into both programs (granted, you have to save your AI files as version 8 or earlier for this to work correctly with Flash MX). But if you use Illustrator to export a SWF file, only Flash will be able to use it. LiveMotion doesn't import SWF files, and with more and more programs supporting the SWF format on both an input as well as an output basis, this is a glaring omission.

Well, what about Photoshop files, then? Again, LiveMotion isn't as integrated as it claims to be. I imported (placed, whatever) the same Photoshop 7 document into both programs, and both did exactly the same thing: they flattened the image layers into a single bitmap. Surely I would have thought that LiveMotion would have retained layers and other settings from the native PSD file, but no dice. Now, LiveMotion did retain layer effects when dragging and dropping from Photoshop, and Flash MX did not. But for the most part, Flash MX kept up with, and in some cases, even surpassed LiveMotion in integrating with other Adobe file formats, which was a huge shock.

Organization
Fortunately, both programs have various ways of organizing your projects so you don't drown in a deluge of layers or panels. It bears mentioning again that Flash MX has made so many wholesale improvements in this area that it's almost mind-boggling, but LiveMotion is fairly competent here as well. Both let you organize your layers on the timeline into folders or groups (fig 4), but LiveMotion goes one better than MX by borrowing the shy layers feature from After Effects, which lets you completely prevent layers you don't want to mess with from showing up in the timeline at all. You can replicate this functionality in Flash MX through folder groupings, but it's not as straightforward a process as in LiveMotion.

Figure 4: Flash MX's folders (left) and LiveMotion 2's groups (right) side by side.

As far as tool palettes go, both programs sport a bunch of different panels that you can configure to your heart's content. LiveMotion users will recognize the familiar Adobe tabbed palette interface, while Flash MX users will notice the lack of the familiar Adobe tabbed palette interface that Flash 5 had (much to Adobe's legal consternation) (fig 5). And while LiveMotion makes you hunt and peck through several palettes to change settings in the timeline (fig 6), Flash MX addresses this problem through the new Property Inspector (fig 7), which adapts to present only the relevant settings for whatever type of object you are working on.

Figure 5: No more tabbed interface in Flash.

Figure 6: Plenty o' tabbed interface in LiveMotion.

Figure 7: The contextual goodness of the Flash MX Property Inspector. Same Inspector, two different states (depending on what you have selected).

If there's one organizational area that Flash MX remains light years ahead of LiveMotion in, it has to be the Library. LiveMotion doesn't have an equivalent to Flash's Library to store all your assets, though it is kind of possible to fudge the process somewhat to emulate this feature by making an unused timeline with all of your project's files and pointing aliases to shapes in the live timelines, but this is kludgey and unreliable at best. Plus, the fact that you can publish external Libraries in Flash for use by any number of SWF files gives MX yet another edge.

Round 1 winner: Somewhat surprisingly, Flash MX takes the round here. I thought LiveMotion would improve the animation process enough in version 2 to stay ahead of Flash, especially since Flash 5 had so many discrepancies in this area, but MX's animation enhancements are truly profound and leave little room for complaint. Even though LiveMotion's timeline is a better model than Flash's, with the overall problems I outlined earlier, users frankly might find that buying After Effects itself would be a better use of their money than going for LiveMotion, as After Effects 5.5 with SWF export functionality arguably makes a better straight-up Flash animation tool than LiveMotion does. Ouch.

Round 2: Interactivity

Let me start this round off with a caveat: I'm a designer by training, but over the years I've managed to become pretty adept at Lingo scripting in Director, and more recently, ActionScripting in Flash. But please, keep in mind that I'm don't exactly get my hard-core programming freak on like some of you out there, so I may not hit on everything relevant to you (if that's your bag, baby).

Scripting Environment
Quick quiz for Flash users: What's the first thing you do in a new, virgin timeline? If you said anything like, "create two new layers, one called 'actions' and one called 'labels,'" you've hit on one of the real annoyances in the Flash interface. Unfortunately, this shortcoming hasn't been addressed in Flash MX. LiveMotion, on the other hand, has a script channel and a label channel built in to every timeline (fig 8). These channels are much easier to read in the heat of heavy scripting than the label and action flags in Flash, and it begs the question as to why Macromedia didn't add dedicated scripting and label channels in MX, especially in light of all the other improvements MX offers.

Figure 8: Ahh. LM2 gives you dedicated Label and Script channels in every timeline.

In both apps, even a newbie programmer has to spend a fair amount of time in the scripting window to get anything accomplished. To be frank, I couldn't tell any discernable difference in the way both programs handled their respective scripting windows (fig 9). LiveMotion 2 does a fantastic job of supporting ActionScript, and while the syntax LiveMotion uses is a tad different from Flash, I was able to go back and forth with very little problem. In fact, it's entirely possible to cut and paste relatively complex pieces of code from one program and have the other one support it with little or no tweaking. What's more, both programs have easily accessible hint windows, and both include debugging tools to help out when things inevitably go awry during the coding process.

Figure 9: The scripting windows of Flash MX (left) and LiveMotion 2 (right). Pretty darn close...

Interface
Well, you gotta have a way to assign interactivity to the objects in your project, and the ways both programs go about it are as different as night and day. There are similar concepts running throughout both; it's the implementation that varies so wildly. Both use movie clips as the basis for interactivity, but Flash has dedicated button symbols while LiveMotion uses object states. You can break up the action in Flash MX through the use of scenes, while in LiveMotion you're reliant on the master timeline to contain your entire project. Both programs are extensible; Flash MX through components and LiveMotion through LiveTabs. Identical functionality; very different ways of accessing that functionality. Personally, I think the LiveMotion timeline paradigm breaks down and gets kind of confusing once you get into more complex interactions, and that the Flash interface holds up a little better under the same circumstances. However, I do realize that some users may have the complete opposite experience. There's no right or wrong here, since both accomplish the same task, and interface preference is so subjective anyway.

Round 2 Winner: Surprisingly, it's a draw. Both programs provide more than passable environments to script in, and the methods of writing code for either program are strikingly similar. While LiveMotion 2 may not be able to do absolutely everything Flash 5 can, as Adobe's marketing literature proclaims, it's damn close. Simply put, scripting is no longer a liability for LiveMotion, and there's quite a lot you can do with it. And choosing an interface is a matter of individual taste, so I'll leave that judgment to you.

Round 3: Intangibles

OK—we're down to the third and final round in a very close bout! We'll try to make this one quick by just naming off some of the variables that could ultimately decide this match:

Video. Flash MX supports it natively; LiveMotion 2 doesn't. BUT...if you bring Wildform's $129 Flix utility into the picture, either can have excellent interactive video support.

Latest and greatest. Flash MX can write to the latest revision of the SWF file spec; LiveMotion can only produce Flash 5 SWF files. Flash 6 will give you the embedded video support MX boasts, extra compression, and the ability to load external JPEG and MP3 files at runtime. But Flash 6 isn't everywhere quite yet, and could take several months or more to become as pervasive as the Flash 5 player.

Speed. Both programs perform comparably under Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9. But Flash MX runs circles around LiveMotion 2 under Mac OS X. That's a big issue for OS X adopters.

Interoperability. Do you collaborate with other designers and developers frequently? If so, chances are that you'll need to be able to share FLA files with colleagues. LiveMotion has its own proprietary LIV format which is incompatible with Flash's native file format.

Community. No contest here. There's a huge and active Flash community. Go to your local bookstore and you'll have your pick of scores of Flash books. LiveMotion just doesn't have that kind of user base.

Round 3 Winner: Flash MX takes this round easily, as there are just too many variables in its favor.

The scorecard

Wow! This matchup was chock full of shockers, and the bout was much closer than I imagined. But in the end, Flash MX is the winner and still champion. Kudos to the LiveMotion team for getting as close as they did, but Flash MX gets my strong recommendation here for addressing every single glaring weakness that plagued Flash 5. Ultimately, however, you have to be your own judge. Fortunately, both Macromedia and Adobe offer 30-day trials of Flash MX and LiveMotion 2, respectively, so take 'em for a spin and see which is best for you. You just might be surprised...

Filed under: Feature on May 7th, 2002

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