Minimum Requirements: PowerPC, Mac OS 8.6, 64MB RAM (Flix), 32MB RAM (SWfx), 10MB hard drive space for each
Mac OS X Support: Carbon
Retail Price: $99.00 (Flix), $29.99 (SWfx)
Availability: Out Now
First off, let's get one thing straight; I'm tired of the letter X. I don't mind the moniker OS X because it's still pronounced as the number ten. But this X thing is far too overused. We've got X-Games, Windows XP, Monster X...give the letter a break, everybody, it wasn't designed to see this much action. Using X at the beginning or ending of a word doesn't automatically make it sound cutting-edge, it makes it sound...well, pornographic.
Of course, maybe that's what everyone's going for.
Now, some of you all might be saying, "Kirk, how do you sleep at night?"
Much better now, thank you, that Wildform has given us, in what is undoubtedly the worst intro-to-focus transition in the history of Applelinks reviews, Flix and SWfx (those accursed Xs, again).
Wildform has been around for a while now, starting out as a multimedia website that featured music downloads, interactive videos, games, etc. Extremely disappointed with the performance of Real Player (aren't we all?), they turned to the blossoming Flash. Seeing its capabilities, the company sold the website to a group of investors and shifted focus to Internet media software. The results thus far are the Wildform Video Library (a collection of royalty free video clips for purchase and download), and the focus of this review, Flix and SWfx.
Flix:
Web video is pretty much dominated by three major players; the fantastic QuickTime, the decent Windows Media, and the useless Real. Flix, by way of the Flash format, is trying to sneak up in there, and why not? Until we get a format that provides both high quality video with a small file size and wide compatibility, I'm willing to consider any option thrown my way.
However, live motion videos in Flash format? Isn't that an oxy moron? After all, Flash is all about vectors, so what's the point in bringing in video? Well, there are two. First, Flash is more widely accepted than QuickTime, Windows Media and Real (according to a March, 2001 Media Metrix study, over 96% of all Web users can view Flash content without a download). And second, Flash can be, even with video, much smaller...albeit with a loss of quality.
For instance, I've been doing quite a bit of video editing in iMovie 2 lately, compiling clips of my honeymoon. Using iMovie's Export to Web feature produced a 6.5MB .mov file. Not bad for nearly three minutes of video, but too much for mom to bother with through her Compuserve connection. After running the 6.5MB .mov file through Flix, I was presented with an 868K .swf, and this was at Flix's default settings for 56K video (8kbps audio, 32kbps video). Of course, the quality wasn't nearly as good, but that can be easily adjusted. Flix comes with 13 output presents, but also affords you the ability to customize everything from frames per second (fps) to the movie's dimensions to the sampling and bitrate of the audio. As with all web graphics and video, it's up to the designer to find that compromise between file size and quality.
Although I worked solely with QuickTime movies, Flix can handle just about any web file format you throw its way:
Audio: .mp3, .wav, .wma
Video: .asf, .avi, .dv, .mov/.qt, .mpeg, .wmv
Still Images: jpg/.jpe, .gif, .png, .bmp/.rle,.psd/.pdd, .tif, .pct/.pic, .tga/.vda/.icb/.vst
Flix can even be set to automatically generate the HTML code needed to embed your movie on a web page.
I experienced no hang-ups or crashes using Flix, and the encoder chugged along at a fairly decent speed. Although Wildform offers free e-mail support for only a paltry fifteen days, their website does contain some very good (although mostly PC biased) tutorials. Any fault with the program itself, therefore, can mainly be attributed to the process of getting video on the web. Flix achieves the results it claims to produce, it's just a matter of whether the inherent limitations of these results will be acceptable by you and your clients.
SWfx:
Now, let's say one of these clients wants a website with a little more verve. He wants banner ads with kick and page titles with pizzazz. I'd first try to talk said client out of such grandiose visions, as animation on the web annoys more than it delights. However, approached judiciously, animated text can be effective and...well...downright cool. Flash and other tools such as e-Picture Pro are great for animating text, but it can take a while. If your client is in a rush and is not too demanding, Wildform's SWfx may be all you need.
SWfx, in its simplest form, animates text. SWfx, in its most complex form, animates text. That's it. Open it up, type in your test, select the animation, save it, your done. It's that simple (the animation below was produced in three minutes). The difficulties in using this program stem directly from the user interface.
But let's take this one step at a time. After launching SWfx, you're presented with the window below. Although it's not presented in this order, you should probably first select the animation size in the Movie area; I found it easier to constrain the text to this box than to resize the box to fit the type). You can also select fps and background color here, and even assign a link to the animation...nice for banner ads.
After this is set, I worked my way up to the Font screen, selecting the color (you can only assign one color to the entire animation, although some effects incorporate others), and X and Y positions which tell SWfx at what point in your window you want the animation to start. For some reason, you cannot select the font from within this Font window. That must be done from the Font and Size options in the Macintosh Menu Bar. Explain that one to me.
And hey, while you're at it, also explain why I can't tab from box to box. If I want to change the size of the animation, I have click in the width box, make my edit, then click in the height box. Seeing that every other program on the planet allows you to hit tab to cycle through these fields...
But okay, back to the matter at hand. You enter your text in the Text Entry field, of course, which harkens back to the days of Photoshop 3. This box doesn't reflect your choice of typeface, its color or the background color; it's just a white box with black text. I wouldn't expect or want to see the animation in there, of course, but at least the typeface, size and color would helpful. To see how it'll all come together, you have to select the preview option. To its credit, the preview window is displayed in real time and can be set to Loop and Auto Preview so changes are immediately reflected.
This comes in most handy when it's time to select from the 303 (at press time) preset animations that ship with SWfx. All of these work with Flash 3 and beyond, while 180 require at least Flash 4 (these are easily identified by a different color in the effects window, and a warning message can be set to pop up when one is selected). As you cycle through the options, the preview window updates to show what your text will look like. More often than not, the animation doesn't fit in the window and has to be resized. This process of selecting the perfect animation from over three hundred options and getting it to fit properly can be quite time consuming.
Those experienced with Flash can create their own effects for SWfx, and more can be downloaded form the Wildform website. Plenty of tutorials are there as well, making a simple program even simpler to use.
SWfx is generally stable once it's open, but it would always crash immediately when launching it for the first time after booting up my computer. The second time and beyond, no troubles. Odd. Also odd is that SWfx will work in either Classic OS or Mac OS X, depending upon from which OS it was installed. Although there is only one installer, you must launch it twice, from each OS, in order to use it both systems.
Interface and stability troubles aside, SWfx can be a handy and extremely inexpensive program for those who need to generate simple text animations or want to include them as elements in a larger design. You don't get nearly the amount of power you do in Flash or e-Picture Pro, but you also don't get the headaches (or debt).
And for the love of all that's holy, please buy a book on web design while you're at it. Just because you can easily create animations, that doesn't give you the right to throw them all over the place. Remember, people, less is more...just like with usage of the letter X.
There. I've said my peace, and I'm going to sleep.
Applelinks Ratings:
Flix
SWfx
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Review: Flix and SWfx
