Macromedia includes four 'getting started' tech-support incidents (a telephone call and follow-up calls for the same issue) within 90 days of purchase. The apps within Macromedia Studio 8 all include extensive help files, plus access to an excellent online support center with well-written FAQs, tutorials, and peer forums. Both Flash and Fireworks get a bevy of new blend modes and filters. Flash 8 also handles pixel graphics for the first time and provides better font control. But Flash 8 offers the most-intriguing new toys, such as the ability to lay video on top of video so that you can make, for example, a superhero fly above a traffic jam. The addition of FlashPaper 2 to the Studio suite adds the ability to make print-ready, interactive PDF documents within the suite. To start, Dreamweaver lets you drag and drop XML feeds into pages, handy for newsy Web sites and blogs. Macromedia expanded Studio's tools for making dynamic and expressive content. Studio 8 costs $999, or $399 to upgrade from Studio MX 2004 or earlier versions.įlash 8 Professional adds a bundle of new effects and blend modes, which you can control at runtime. Just don't expect Adobe's plans to buy Macromedia to result in hybrid Adobe-Macromedia software quite yet Studio 8 offers no such surprises. And Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver now optimize multimedia content for cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile gadgets yet to come. To shrink the file sizes and hasten the playback time of Flash animation on end-user desktops, Macromedia gutted and rebuilt its popular Flash Player. The most tantalizing new product in this bundle is Flash 8, particularly because it introduces alpha channel video creation and provides abundant new effects that animators can manipulate in real time. Vector graphics app FreeHand MX has vanished from the suite, partly because it duplicated functions offered by Fireworks.

Also included are the PDF maker FlashPaper 2 and the Web site manager Contribute 3. The suite wraps together an animation tool, Flash 8 a Web design app, Dreamweaver 8 and a graphics editor, Fireworks 8. Many digital content makers can find their way around Macromedia software in their sleep, but the upgrade to Studio 8 makes common tasks easier to execute for those without coding expertise. Macromedia Studio 8 is a complete toolkit for Web designers and animators, and it introduces new features that will make creative mouths water.

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