Web Visuals with Pizazz: Web Animation Buyer's Guide

As videographers, we tell our stories and relay our adventures (and business projects) with our camcorders. We can hardly wait for the day that our movies will reach the masses over the Internet in their original, high-resolution quality. But full-screen, full-motion video streaming is not yet a reality. The sheer file size of a video clip is enough to bog down even the fastest desktop system. Even the best, most creative video project loses its polish, and perhaps its whole intended message when sent on the Web. We're left watching poor quality, jerky video broadcast on a small rectangle on our monitors.
While you're waiting for technology to catch up with our expectations, here's a way to work with some excellent animation tools that are available now. Learning and using them is easier than you might think. Using virtual cartoon actors or an innovative slideshow to animate your video project or message for the Web is a viable way to tell the world your story. The resulting file size of an animated clip can be 100 times smaller than a similar length video segment.
Web animation software packages offer a world of artistic fun with many different features. Some products use layers of .gifs, others use DHTML editors to animate pages, and still others use JavaScript. While some simple Web animation tools are offered free online, we will focus on those available at the retail level, and their prices that range from $30 to $1,000. Most of the higher-priced programs include Web animation as just one aspect of their total package.
Here are descriptions of a few of the products listed on pages 38 and 39.

Under $100

These products are capable of creating animated output for business or hobby. They may communicate with other software products within or outside of their brand-name, but these products have one job, to create animation. While many of these lower-priced products utilize vector-based graphics, some do not (See Vector vs. Bitmap sidebar). Generally, their minimum system requirements are not too demanding. Lower-priced Web animation tools typically lack some features and flexibility. But they are useful to consider, especially when a simple presentation will suffice.

KoolMoves

Lucky Monkey Designs
$30
KoolMoves creates Flash movies and frames for animated .gifs. It has the ability to import vector clipart, images and sounds. Separate frames, containing text, shapes and sounds combine to create the animation. For character animation, characters move from pose to pose in successive frames and KoolMoves automatically morphs the drawings, creating smooth animated motion between the characters. For text animation, the program's manipulation capabilities allow moving, scaling, rotating, skewing and flipping text.
You can play KoolMoves projects in its internal player, in a Web browser or stand-alone Flash player. You can also export your animation as a Flash movie. KoolMoves supports .wav and .mp3 audio files and any PC processor with 16MB RAM can run the program.


GIF Animator 5, COOL 3D 3.0, JavaRazor 2.…