Flash CS3 101

What is Flash?

• Authoring program that creates interactive multimedia files, called movies in Flash
• Animation sequencer - uses a series of frames and a sequence of scenes to make its movies.  Each frame of the movie can have one or more elements that can change size, position, color from previous frame to create animation effect.
• Vector-based drawing program - draws pictures on screen using points with specific coordinate values (vectors) to define curves.  Vectors that connect together in a sequence describe a path. 
  • Different from bitmaps -- if you enlarge a bitmapped graphic, the pixels are enlarged and image may become pixilated (jagged).  If you enlarge a vector graphic,the pixels are recalculated every time the image is rendered on the screen
  • Vector based drawing is faster because it only renders bitmapped images when they are needed from mathematical equations that are smaller to store than bitmap information about pixels.
  • Flash vector drawing will also straighten out your lines or draw true circles.
• Video
  • tools for adding interactivity to video clips
  • Video encoder creates streaming FLV video files & provides skins. Video streams progressivly
  • Export to Quicktime movies, including movieclips and other run-time effectds.
  • Export to compressed SWF files with exceptional compressor--yields small files with high quality.
• Import and export MP3 audio files
  • MP3 provides high audio quality and smaller file size
  • loop audio clips
• Actionscript 3.0
  • scalable for beginners to advanced programmers
  • generate actionscript from animation on screen to save for reuse
• Component improvements
  • non-compiled components available which let you modify the look, color, skins, shape of the component
  • compiled components also available

Flash uses Symbols

• Symbol characteristics can be changed during movie
• An image or a sound file that is stored as a symbol only downloads one time in the first key frame in which it appears. 
• Rest of information about changes to file is in vectors that describe changes.
• Sound files are often looped and played over and over again - MP3 compression provides good sound and small sound file size.
• If you don't store image as a symbol, it has to be downloaded each time it is used!

In Flash you can edit symbols from

• within the movie, where you can see the immediate effects
• in a new window in which you can see the changes to the symbol on the stage
• in the traditional symbol-editing window
• changing a Flash symbol changes all instances of the symbol within the movie

Flash Movies and their Parts  

can be saved

• As Flash ( .fla) documents
• Played inside Flash
• Have to be exported as SWF files to play on the Web or in a Flash Player

Exported as SWF movies

• play on HTML pages on the web
• Play in Flash Player
• Both video and audio content compressed

Other export formats :

• QuickTime digital video (MOV) files
• Animated GIFS (without the sound)
• AVI files, but tend to be large file size.
• Individual frames can be exported as bitmap images (e.g., jpg, gif, bmp). During export, can compress bitmaps with JPEG compression

Sound files without video

• default is .MP3,
• MP3, aif & .wav files can be imported into Flash

Movies are made up of layers in a Timeline:

Layers are arranged from front to back -- top layer is in front

To keep track of content, as a general rule of thumb:

• create a new layer for each object
• Drawn objects that touch one another will become grouped automatically into one object. When separated, you lose part of the image
• give each layer a meaningful name. 
  • When there are more than a few layers, it is much easier to edit movie if you know what is in each layer
• Create a separate layer for ActionScripts
• Flash lets you create folders in the timeline to organize layers of different types -- easier layer management.
• Good practice to lock layers you are not working on to prevent accidental changes to objects on it.

Resources

• Web sites from the past
• Safari Electronic books on Web design, CSS, Adobe CS3 applications, available on-line through the Cal Poly Library
• Adobe Video Tutorials on the Adobe Video Workshop Website
  • click the "Start Video Workshop" button
  • on the next page choose Flash CS3 on the product dropdown list
  • on the Select a topic window on the right, select "Getting Started" to view introductory Flash video tutorials