Flash is a vector engine, but its support of bitmap fills means it’s also a bitmap engine – when a bitmap is dragged onto the stage, Flash actually creates a four-sided shape then attaches a bitmap fill with an identity texture transform matrix.Flash has a set of fairly advanced algorithms for rendering vector graphics, including lines, splines, gradients, and antialiased, filtered bitmap fills. Flash 7 is a modern interactive platform, with a powerful design and animation authoring tool, an object-oriented type-safe dynamic scripting engine, bitmap rendering with antialiasing and subpixel precision, and advanced video and audio playback features.

You can find many programs out there that allow you to create Flash movies besides the original Macromedia Flash development environment. Each one of these programs has a different focus; some are designed to make character animation easy, others specialize in text special affects, there are others that allow you to create 3d objects in the Flash format and so on ...