Home

Corel Rave 1.0 - a new contestant?

So Corel's gotten a SWF-program too? How good can that be? Well, it's actually not so bad. We've been playing a bit with Rave 1.0 from Corel, and it's a rather good animation program.

Adobe launched LiveMotion as a competitor to Flash, and some people at Adobe really meant that too... The last thing we've heard about LiveMotion was that it's not been the success Adobe ecpected. 'It might actually be re-buildt into a more animation-focused program, backing up the weaker sides of LiveMotion' or it 'might even be discontinued'. This was just rumours buzzing around the corridors at the previous FlashForward Conference, but it makes you wonder if there is room for yet another vecor animation package.

Corel did not launch it's package bragging about being able to take on Flash. It's not even a program that you can buy separately. Corel Rave 1.0 can only be bought as part of the CorelDRAW 10 package, that has been Corel's flagship in graphic design for at least 10 years. Rave is the animation program of the CorelDraw package.

Corel now and then
I remember the first time I used a Corel program. I think it was CorelDRAW 3, and some things are still around when you're working with a Corel product: things work differently than you would expect. When you click a point on a vector curve, you sort of expect that you would be able to adjust the bezier handles by ALT-clicking or CTRL-clicking and then dragging? NO way! Almost anything you have learnt in other applications like Freehand or Illustrator does NOT apply to Corel. Almost anything you can do to a vector or object in Corel must be activated from the right click menu.

The reason why I am a CorelDraw user, is mainly because I have been a graphical designer using a PC rather then a Mac. in the early days, the most advanced graphical tool on PC was CorelDraw. I'm still using CorelDraw now, simply because I'm used to it, although I'm using Illustrator & Freehand aswell. CorelDraw always had more features & tools then you could find in Illustrator or Freehand, one of the most important features to me was the anti-aliasing screen preview option, CorelDraw had that allready in the very early version, while the 'others' are still catching up.
Peter van den Wyngaert, nrg.be

This is particularily cumbersome and totally unnessecary as the ALT, SHIFT and CTRL keys have virtually no function at all, but they could completely eliminated the need for the constant right-clicking just to access the most usual functions. Other places where you'd expect to be able to right click, like in the timeline, you can't. I would love to be able to add a keyframe here by right-clicking.

Based on former user experiences with tools from companies like Macromedia, Adobe and Microsoft, the list of things that does not work as you'd expect goes on and on. I'm not saying that this is bad, it's just 'very different'. Corel have a huge amount of fans all over the globe.

Is it worth Rave-ing about?
Rave 1.0 is a really nice tool for doing animations and such. Corel have made some nice tutorials that come with the program, and there are more of them on the web. Using these, the program is pretty easy to learn. Once you have finished the tutorials, you should be able to figure out the differences in the tools from other programs too. Drawing in Rave is just like drawing in CorelDraw. All the features you'd expect from a vector drawing program is there, plus a couple new things...

The coolest thing about Rave might be all the effects that are built into the program. Ever wanted to do a 'lens distortion' on a vector graphic? In Rave, you can even animate it! The interactive distortion tool, the blend tool and the spaced out brushes available from the Artistic Media tool could alone make this tool a contender to many existing vector packages. As Rave is part of CorelDraw 10, you also have the power of this tool and all the other tools in the package.

If you want to do some bit-map effects, just convert any vector shape to a bitmap. There's plenty of effects to choose from from artistic charcoal brushes to 3D warp effects. Text can follow any paths, and these can be animated. Your work-space can be customized and saved. There's presets for Flash 'look-alike' and LiveMotion 'look-alike' arrangements of panels, tools and the timeline. You can make multi-state buttons and add Get-URL statements to these. Animation is easy as soon as you figure it out, and the possibilities here are not too bad either.

Close, but no ...
There are many good things to say about this program, but writing SWF files is not one of the programs strengths. The filesizes we generated was huge, even on simple projects. A simple text effect that fades letters onto the screen became a 52Kb SWF-file. Just to compare this, we made the same effect in Flash, and here the file-size became only 1,4Kb - the Rave file was more than 37 times the size! This is not acceptable at all.

A closer look into the SWF-files generated by Rave revealed that someone's been really lazy when creating this program. Rave does not use the thing that is the whole key to the success of the SWF format: Symbols. For a simple tweening of a object containing a bitmap texture, Rave stores the entire moving symbol (plus it's textrure!) EACH and every frame! This results in a 364Kb file that could have been re-created in Flash at less than 10Kb.

Our opinion
Is this a Flash contender? No. It's a simple animation program that have got some good tricks up it's sleeve. If you are going to use Rave, make sure you do not put it's animations on the web. Your users will hate you for doing this unless they are on a high speed connection. On the other hand: if you are looking for a vector/bitmap drawing and FX package, CorelDraw may be a good choice for you.