Create and add Flash animations to your Web sites.
Want to learn and make Flash, absolutely Free? Vectorian Giotto has powerful yet very simple user interface that will allow you to quickly and easily create professional Flash animations for websites. Even if you had no experience whatsoever with animation or graphics tools before, you can learn to use Vectorian Giotto effectively within 10 minutes. With easy-to-use interface, powerful drawing tools, sophisticated shape morphing, stunning built-in effects, sound and scripting support, an expert designer will do much more in less time, while the beginner will find it very easy to make incredible, professional-looking movies. In addition, it supports layers and gradient fills as well as intersection, union and difference operations on objects. Combine and manipulate text, images and shapes to create Flash movies. You can set key animation parameters as dimensions, background color and frame rate. Animation is based on simple motion tween concept: set-up start and end look of objects and Giotto does the rest by itself. You can preview your animation inside Vectorian Giotto without launching a browser or external player. Creating animations with Vectorian Giotto requires absolutely no knowledge of programming or scripting. You can very easily add amazing effects to your animation - objects can translate, rotate, change size, change color or gradient fill, stretch, skew - or do at the same time any combination of those effects - all with minimal effort from user and using the same motion tween concept. Now you are able to transform your creative ideas to cool banners, preloaders, navigation menus, and other Flash artworks, with an impressively short learning curve! Vectorian Giotto can be your companion in enhancing the experience of your website visitors, and creating WOW effect.
Can create buttons
At least 15-20 minutes of animation
Awesome tools to use
Mega similar interface to flash
Cons
Only saves in .SWF files (AKA useless to upload anywhere except on your own website)
It's mainly used just to create buttons for some reason...
Summary
While this program is similar to Adobe Flash, you might as well get AF because this program is nothing but misleading trash.
Takes up way to much space, you can only make 1500+ frames (which animation wise isn't enough) and you can't export it to a proper file that you can watch back like on Windows Media Player or something.
This program is complete udder useless trash.
Not very useful
jfegglest83
Pros
Easy to use
Cons
Runs out of memory far too quickly
Can't handle much more than buttons or bouncing balls
Crashes constantly
Summary
Essentially, if all you need this for is creating buttons on a web page, then it will work for you. Anything more than that however, and this can't handle more than a couple dozen frames. If you want to make actual flash animations I would suggest finding a different program because this one DOES NOT cut it. I'm very unimpressed and find that the websites claim that it's just like using Flash is extremely misleading. The interface is similar, but the quality of the program isn't even remotely close to the Adobe software. Not even remotely.
Alright SWF Software
44thdaniel
Pros
Export movie quickly.
Free.
Cons
Not very simple to use.
Summary
Great free product but some serious hassles.
TMNC61
Pros
Able to create complex animations in a freeware package. Easy and intuitive to use
Cons
Hogs memory
Slow and prone to crashes
Colors not always rendered correctly in Flash exports
Can be fiddly to use
Summary
I've been using this program to create fairly complex animations, mostly using art I've created and imported from other programs as PNG files; kind of akin to traditional animation. Giotto handles this reasonably well but soon runs out of memory and hangs. Therefore you need to save your work frequently. If you're making anything more than 1000 frames long, it's best to divide your work into separate projects and join them together upon completion, after having rendered them to Flash videos and possibly then converting them to another format.
If you wish to resize or move objects within the work area or "stage", you can do this using the usual type handles, but beware: you can't always position objects exactly as desired. There is a snapping function which you can turn off, but this seems to have no effect in certain circumstances. For example, when rotating an object, you get it almost to where you want it and then... snap! it jumps ahead and snaps to wherever Giotto wants it to be - not where you want it. Turning off snapping seems to have no effect.
Another annoying issue is that when using a graphics pad and pen, getting the cursor onto the rotation handles is incredibly tricky. You seem to have an area of about four pixels to hit in order to successfully grab a handle. It's easy to think you've got a handle, look at the screen, do the rotation and find the cursor's dropped off the handle and is now rescaling your object.
Then you find the pivot point moves between keyframes. You put it in point A in both keyframes 1 and 2. Then you look at KF #1 again and find it's moved. You fix it and check KF #2. You find the pivot is now at Point B. You move it back to point A and go back to check KF#1. There's your pivot, now at point B. I had to give up!
Be very careful when working with layers. Unless you remember to lock those you're not actually working with, you can easily find you've unwittingly moved to another layer and have begun to screw up your work.
You can render your work to Flash files but you can find odd outlines appearing where layers are meant to seamlessly blend into each other, eg. with a bending knee formed of two halves. Some colors such as gray, particularly if they're of reduced opacity get rendered as a pinkish hue, nothing like what was intended.
Having said all that, I can tell you that the program is, nevertheless worth using. You just have to bear all the above, in mind. If you do, you can still create some great animations for free.
Except for the bugs, this is really amazing!!
Matheus_Carvalho
Pros
You have the chance to learn how to make animations, for free!
You can do vectorial drawings, morph the shapes, the only limit is your creativity.
I plan to use it to prepare educational material. I think animations are an excellent way to teach and learn.
Cons
Buggy. It will crash after some actions, so it is good to save your work constantly.
Summary
If you want to make animations, you must give this a try. It is much better than GIF animations, and free.
Nothing but crashes!
JA54
Pros
Easy to download the program, thats about it
Cons
Poor description of functions, constant crashes, fails to create flash files most of the time
Summary
I spent a couple of weeks with this program trying to make a fairly basic animation using 2 bitmaps. I could not get rid of the white background on the overlaying bitmap without extreme difficulty "nibbling" away with the eraser. This caused the program to get slower & slower until it would crash. After long hours of playing I managed to get through it, but when I tried to export the file as a flash the program would close and the file would have 0 bytes. The crashing is intolerable and happens more and more frequently as you work with a file. It has taught me one thing, you get what you pay for, this program is useless!
Easy to Use
Sam_the_Clown
Pros
Free, attractive interface, good selection of tools
Cons
A few more tutorials would be nice
Summary
There are very few Flash design programs offered for free (Power Bullet Presenter is another one), so I'm thankful for this program. It comes with a selection of action scripts, templates and graphic tools for easily designing your own applications. The preview tools are easily assessable for viewing your work as you go. I haven't experienced any bugs nor crashes while using the program. Since graphic programs use a considerable amount of system resources, I would recommend a fresh reboot prior to using Vectorian Grotto, plus closing any other programs while using it. Hopefully, this will safeguard aganist any program crashes. Again, I've never experienced this situation. It's my desire that the program's developer continues to improve and offer further enhancements to the program. I like this one.<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on Jun 25, 2011<p/>While I still like this program, I've discovered that many of the tutorials that accompany Vectorian Grotto were apparently not updated along with the program's updating. As a result, I'm left confused as what to do at some points because what I'm asked to click on is simply not there.
It is buggy! Icon won't scale to medium on Win 7!
jdbparsons
Pros
awesome interface!! Creates SWF!!
Cons
I experienced crashes as well!!
Summary
Also on my Win 7 desktop my icons are enlarged to a larger size. This program's icon does not scale properly with the others when using either medium icons view (right-click desktop, then mouse-over view, then select medium icons) or large Icons view; Instead it gets grossly deformed when even at medium. I can understand some programs don't support "Large" format but this program does not even support "Medium" format. I might try to use IcoFx here on download.com to try to edit it but I wish the developers would just do it themselves because this is annoying!! Other wise, besides the bugs, the program is great!
Looks like a cool program but it's buggy!!
JamesAndersonJr
Pros
Lots of cool features for free!
Cons
I'm using Windows 7 64-Bit, and when I choose to start a new file from template (File ->>Start New From Template... ), after I pick the template the program suddenly crashes and terminates!! Ugh!
Summary
This is a buggy program or either not written well for Windows 7 (64-Bit). The the feature set and interface is decent enough, but If you're like me you won't get a lot done with this program before they fix it. Looking forward to next version!
Simple but rich user interface, good quality of exported Flash animations, nice set of built in effects, cool color picker.
Cons
Looks like an old software at first glance, some graphical elements could be better. Avi export could be handy.
Summary
As I said, useful flash animation software, too bad it's not advertised properly, it gave me opportunity to finally play with Flash with no hassle. I made few animations for business use, and later continued working just for fun.