Roll your own creative suite

Seth Rosenblatt CNET

Published: 25 Apr 2007

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Go to section: Alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat & Dreamweaver Alternatives to Flash, Soundbooth, InDesign & AfterEffects

So, you can get the basic functionalities of Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Dreamweaver without crippling your wallet. But how about Flash?

Synfig Studio is a great answer to the replace-Flash question. Like Flash, it’s a 2D vector-based animation tool, and it’s one of several programs we've found that tries to conquer that particular programming mountain. It does an admirable job of it — especially for freeware.

Synfig takes a bit of effort, but if you’re reading this article then you can probably handle it. There are four install files that need to be installed in order: Gtkmm, Gtk+, Synfig Core and Synfig Studio. (Actually, it took us two tries to get a successful installation.) There’s also what seems like several metric tons of documentation and tutorials on the Synfig wiki, which is befitting for any application with Linux roots that has been ported to Windows.

Neither Flash nor Synfig Studio make for quick studies without a guide, but both are learnable. Whether Synfig is truly capable of competing with Flash for complex multimedia animations remains to be seen. Is anyone out there giving it a try?

Adobe's Soundbooth might have a vice-like grip on your audio-editing sensibilities, but Audacity can set you free. A full-force audio editor, Audacity has been earning critical and popular acclaim for several years now, and every new version improves significantly upon the last. The interface isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s clean and uncluttered — impressive for a program with so much functionality. It supports all major audio formats, including basic effects such as reverb, delay and compression. Additional functionality comes from an extensive array of plug-ins, ensuring that Audacity can now confidently stand on its own against Soundbooth.

Adobe's InDesign and Microsoft's Publisher now have a freeware equivalent in Scribus. By now you’ve worked out the theme: Scribus is lightweight, it does its job admirably, and it costs you nothing. If it doesn’t do exactly what you want now, it probably will within six months. Scribus does have some oddities, mostly related to the scaling of imported images, but there’s something else about it that’s far more interesting: it painlessly brings in documents from the OpenOffice.org suite and it uses The GIMP for image editing. So we’re beginning to see freeware publishers ramp up their game as they hook up with other open-source applications to compete more effectively against expensive programs like Adobe's.

We think that Adobe's AfterEffects will soon get some serious competition from Jahshaka, although the program certainly isn’t there yet. Its producers announce proudly that Jahshaka is the first open-source video editor, which is an impressive claim given the amount of freeware floating around out there.Jahshaka uses OpenGL, so make sure that you’ve installed that runtime environment before you run it.

One of Jahshaka’s most important and useful features is encoding support for audio (OGG, MP2, MP3 and WAV) and video (AVI, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, DV, MP4 and MOV). There’s playback support for a range of audio and video formats that seems to cover nearly everything imaginable. There’s also a frame-by-frame paint over function, cross-platform portability, customisable zoom functions, auto save and recovery, an animation component that looks like it can compete comfortably with Flash, and many more features.

Jahshaka also comes with a cross-platform multimedia player (the Jahplayer) that's designed to work on Nokia mobile phones as well as your notebook and desktop systems.

What we’re seeing in open-source software and freeware development today is extremely impressive. No longer content to rely on expensive commercial products, programmers are taking a second look at what those products do and how they can do it better. This type of innovation has driven down hardware prices for the past 20 years. In this burgeoning era of freeware, customer choice is king, and paying thousands of pounds for application suites may soon be a thing of the past.

Editor's Note
We'd particularly like to hear from any professionals who have dipped a toe in the open-source creativity software waters. Do these free applications cut the mustard when it comes to making your living, or do you simply have to grit your teeth and pay Adobe's prices?

 

Go to section: Alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat & Dreamweaver Alternatives to Flash, Soundbooth, InDesign & AfterEffects

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