Macromedia debuts Flash Professional 8

Macromedia has announced Macromedia Flash Professional 8, the latest version of the Flash authoring tool. Designed to create rich interactive content for websites, interactive presentations, and mobile devices, Flash Professional 8 offers major advancements in expressive tools, video, quality user experiences, and mobile content authoring. Flash Professional 8 now includes unique tools for designing graphic effects, animation, text, video, and content for mobile devices. It offers new effects, includes a new custom easing tool that enables precise control over animation, and features FlashType font-rendering engine, which the company says ensures clear, high-quality text. Flash will ship in September in both Basic ($400) and Professional ($700) editions as well as part of the Macromedia Studio 8 bundle. Upgrades to Flash Professional 8 will be $400.

"Our customers continually surprise and delight us with the incredible experiences they create with Flash," said David Mendels, general manager, Macromedia. "It is just amazing to see what people create with the technology. Now with the new real-time effects, alpha-channel video, improved text rendering, and performance improvements in Flash Professional 8, we can't wait to see what Flash designers and developers will come up with."

The new video tools and workflows in Flash Professional 8 offer industry-first capabilities for integrating video within digital experiences. Video professionals can now easily design, encode, and deploy customized, interactive video using the new Flash Video Encoder, which delivers some of the highest quality video in the industry at the smallest file sizes, according to the company.

The encoder operates as part of the integrated authoring tools in Flash or as a stand-alone product with batch-encoding options. New support for 8-bit alpha channels allows developers/designers to combine semi-transparent video with other video, graphics, or digital assets. Also included is a new Flash Video plug-in for professional nonlinear video editing systems so editors can export video directly for the web in Flash Video format.

Flash Professional 8 also includes core tools to aid developers who want to create and deploy content and applications for mobile devices using the Macromedia Flash Lite player. Flash Professional 8 includes interactive device emulators that make it easy for developers to build content once and test it on a wide variety of devices using preset, updatable profiles for more than 70 mobile devices support by Flash Lite.

"We are excited about the possibilities afforded by the Flash Professional 8 authoring tool to develop exceptional mobile applications," said Brad Brockhaug, senior director, Forum Nokia. "In mobile development, timing is critical. The new mobile testing features will save Flash developers and designers valuable time as they continue to bring to market innovative content and applications for mobile devices."

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 is expected to ship in September. Pricing is $700 for a full license and $300 for an upgrade. Flash Basic 8, a subset of Flash Professional 8 used for simple motion graphics and animation, is expected to ship in September for $400.

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Other story tags: video editing