Alright, I will not go over for comparisons in making interactive websites or anything that has to do with ActionScript because Flash CS5 clearly is the winner for having ActionScript 3.0, which is the newest and the fastest. I'm going to focus on developing animation movies and you'll see why this comparison is made.
My PC's Specifications
Intel Core i5-750
1TB HDD Space
4GB DDR3 RAM
ATI Radeon HD5570 1GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit
Memory Usage
Flash CS5 uses more memory than Flash 8, especially when performing simple tasks like showing multiple large images at once. When creating HD movies (I experienced this while creating this one), you would have to deal a lot with larger sized images, probably even larger than your HD resolution size.
For example, my Touhou animation project is 1280x720 pixels, thats a 720p HD size. I'm doing my art and images on 1920x1080, 1080p HD size so that I could do camera pans and the sort with my characters.
In Flash CS5, here's what happened. When I dragged fifteen 1920x1080 sized images (yeap, for 15 frames) from the Library to the workspace, CS5 won't even show me anything! The images just went missing and you can't do anything about it even after I restarted it countless of times. I tried adding a keyframe and CS5 tells me that I do not have enough memory. On my WNx Homestay animation project, I had over 1000 frames in HD size and CS5 crashed because it couldn't handle 1000 frames! Every time I exported my WNx Homestay as video, it will never succeed, so I had to break them up into separate Flash files to export them. It was not able to handle such simple operations on a HD project.
I was just trying to add a damn keyframe after I managed to get the pictures loaded!
In Flash 8 however, I was able to do all that. When I dragged the same fifteen 1920x1080 images into the workspace, it was there in a millisecond, I swear. CS5 took about 5-10 seconds before it's done just for you to realize that nothing is there.
Therefore, I guess it is safe for me to assume that Flash 8 takes up really much less memory and performs better when it comes to large images. Have you seen Touhou IOSYS animations? Even Core i7s can't handle them. If my decent computer's CS5 couldn't handle an average animation like mine, what more do you expect? Flash 8 does the job though.
Movie Exporting
Flash CS5 is good at exporting movies. Although I must say that the exporting system has not much of a difference between the two. My experience is that, when I told Flash 8 to export my video in 1280x720 pixels, it exports it in a different size with some black borders surrounding it as if it's helping me to "decorate" my movie.
I couldn't resolve this problem until Evo told me about compressing it with the ffdx codec option which will produce the same results but I just went to export my movie in CS5 and it worked fine.
This is what you see in CS5, which is exactly the same as Flash 8. But it exports properly, exactly as specified.
So what I do is, I do my animations in Flash 8, then open it up with CS5 and export them. They give good results, since I was unable to do my animations on CS5, I had to do them on Flash 8 (which is much better). Their workspace design is not that different at all.
Flash 8's movie exporting doesn't seem to be too friendly to me. Flash CS5 justs exports as it is and gets it done, although it will crash if you have lots of frames and a computer below USD$1000 though (from what I experienced).
Overall
Although obsolete, Flash 8 seems better to me than CS5 in movie-making from what I experienced. These are true experiences and I don't know what's the damn problem but my computer's a pretty decent one which costed me RM3000++, which to me, is quite expensive for an average home user desktop PC.
This is the PC I bought. I guess this little guy wouldn't stand a chance for HD videos in CS5.
If you're using Flash 8 and thinking of moving to CS5, just consider whether you need ActionScript or not. If you don't, Flash 8 all the way!
Love,
Nicholas.
