Flash / Swish Effect Help Needed!

[thejungle]

Hi!

On www.cnet.com (skip the ad) the front page has a image slideshow done in Flash? Same with their sister site www.tv.com.

I've never used Flash in my life, but I want to know how hard would it be to create an effect like that - say 5-8 images fading and wiping through a slideshow!

Is it Beginner / Intermediate or Advanced?

I've also seen Swish advertised which is a lot cheaper than Flash - is it a comparable product - I'm looking more for effects etc than fully fledged websites driven by Flash!

Thanks
Ernie

[SLS]

Swish is comparible, and definately great. It's only downfall is that .fla is a proprietary file format that can't be used by competitors, so you can't download cool stuff to use in your projects; you have to make everything from scratch or with the included tutorials/effects. Not so great for a newbie, because I consider a huge part of learning flash to be downloading other peoples projects and effects to see how they work. Another big part is reading online tutorials, of which some do exist for Swish, but not anything comparible to whats out their for flash.

The project you are describing is definately achievable by a novice, it should be pretty easy to put together in flash or swish. I would say within an hour of playing with either software package you should be able to do what you mentioned and then some.

[thejungle]

Swish is comparible, and definately great. It's only downfall is that .fla is a proprietary file format that can't be used by competitors, so you can't download cool stuff to use in your projects; you have to make everything from scratch or with the included tutorials/effects.

The project you are describing is definately achievable by a novice, it should be pretty easy to put together in flash or swish. I would say within an hour of playing with either software package you should be able to do what you mentioned and then some.

Thanks for the info, I knew there'd be a catch with Swish being so cheap. I've downloaded the trial of Flash so I'll have a play with that over the holidays!

Thanks also for the info on the project, since I know nothing about Flash it all looks complicated to me now. Glad to hear it'll make more sense after a few hours of playing!

Ernie