I’m delighted to see that Drew Trujillo (aka Dr. Woohoo) has released a pair of tools for moving After Effects keyframe data into Flash. Along with a free AE export script, Drew has created After Effects 2 Flash-Transform Properties, a Flash extension that smooths the importing of AE data. You can read more about the tools on his blog. (Note: My role in this is kindly overstated; in fact I just helped people smarter than myself get connected–which, for what it’s worth, is what a lot of product management boils down to.)
This kind of integration is, I think, the start of much great progress to come. Back in 1999, when I first heard that Adobe was thinking of making a Web animation tool, I started lobbying my contacts at Adobe & Macromedia for a “Flash Interchange Format” that would enable Flash, AE, and other applications to exchange data with layers, keyframes, object names, and other data intact. The timing wasn’t right, of course, but now that the companies have come together, the opportunities to collaborate are incredible. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, give these tools a shot.
(More on Drew’s work can be found here.)
[Update: I realized I’d inverted the title. It’s now revised to indicate the direction of integration: AE into Flash.]