How to make simple animation with Corel Draw and Adobe Flash

Making images / sketches with Corel Draw is very easy, especially for those who frequently use Corel Draw. Because Corel Draw has a many user friendly tools for manipulating images, that's why I like to create images to be used as an object of animation video using Corel Draw. Visual Basic macros for Corel Draw is also very useful, It helps you to work with Corel Draw much easier. In this hub I will write about creating sketches without using macro, because Visual Basic is programming language and need to be discussed separately.

We will create an animation of the pendulum swing. Create a simple image using Bazier tool, Ellipse tool and Rectangle tool, as shown in the picture below.

Then Group line with circle iusing Group button or ctrl + G, specify center point which is the pendulum will be hung (the upper end of line) by draging the center point icon. There will be at least 4 slides to make this animation, but more slides are better. Copy (ctrl + c then paste) or duplicate (ctrl + d) line, circle and rectangle for three times, then rotate slide 2 and 4 like the picture below. The rectangle are required to keep the potition of image. When all slides is ready, then convert the object (line and circle) including the box (frame) to bitmap using menu Bitmap -> convert to bitmap, this time just click ok button, then right click the object find save bitmap as..., save the object as png format (most picture formats are recognized by flash). Do it for all the rest of bojects. Make sure to save all object on the same folder and give the same name plus sequential number (like ani1, ani2, ani3, ....). Now we are done with Corel Draw.

Create a new file on Adobe Flash. On the menu, find files -> import -> import stage, by file and directory box, go to the folder where you save your slides, select your starting slide (slide 1). Flash will ask you question if sequential files (ani1, ani2, ani3) are detected. Click Ok button.

Increase your animation length four or five times by copying all four frames to next empty colom of the time line by using copy and paste command. When you want to preview your video, Just use Debug video on the Debug menu. Now you are ready to export your video to avi or mov video format by using export video on the files - > export menu. You can convert your video to mpg or other formats using any video converter.

If you succeed in making the video above, then you can try making a video like this.