Moho, a BeOS product, comes to Mac OS X

If you’re looking for Flash production software for Mac OS X, Lost Marble Software has Moho, which has been able to put out Flash files since its BeOS days. And it’s been Carbonized for Mac OS X as of version 2.6.

Moho is a two-dimensional cartoon animation system that lets you create character animation for output to video, or for streaming over the Web via Macromedia’s Flash SWF format. It’s a vector based, not a ink and paint tool that works with scanned drawings. It comes with tools for creating an animated cartoon, from drawing and painting to keyframe animation and multilayer compositing and final output of QuickTime and AVI movie files, as well as streaming Flash animations.

In fact, its vector-based drawing component makes Moho suitable for illustration tasks, as well. The animation tools include manipulators for controlling skeletons, which can be useful in working with characters. And since Moho works with text, it was be used for tasks from video titling to text deformation.

With Moho 2.6, you can import Adobe Illustrator and PostScript files. However, it has no built-in sound support so the folks at Lost Marble recommend using a program like Adobe Premiere to add a soundtrack to your final Moho movie.

Also since Moho is primarily vector-based, all Moho animation must be created inside the program — with a couple of exceptions. It’s possible to import your existing artwork as “Image Layers” that can be animated in Moho as if they were cut-out pieces of paper. Also, you can use an image to trace over, allowing you to draw your original artwork on paper, then trace it by hand into Moho’s vector format.

You can download a demo version of Moho from the Lost Marble Web site. With the trial version, final images and movies that you create are watermarked with a demo label, and exported Flash animations appear only in grayscale. If you purchase the full version of Moho for US$99, you’ll be e-mailed a registration code that will let you unlock the restrictions of the demo version.

SWF is an open-source animation and sound delivery format owned and marketed by Macromedia, which also releases Flash, the standard SWF creation tool, and the Flash Player — the most widely distributed internet software ever.