One of my biggest peeves about Flash is its various hit or miss methods for exporting video. In version 8 and earlier Flash would create a file made up of a series of frame by frame image captures with the soundtrack recorded separately and laid on top. This worked fine, except it didn’t record animations inside of MovieClips or created by ActionScript. It only recorded whatever could be rendered in real time in the authoring environment. In other words, just Graphic symbols. Adobe revamped video export in CS3 to allow both MCs and AS animation to be captured by recording the the SWF output in realtime. The problem with this method was that if your movie dropped frames in FlashPlayer it was going to hiccup in the video output as well. Here’s a way to finally have both performance and your full movie in video form. More »

On a couple of occasions, especially in movies containing a song, I’ve had to include some kind of follow along subtitles. I hear this is super easy in video editing software like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier. However, in Flash the answer is no so apparent. Here’s how I got a subtitle effect identical in look and quality to those on DVD and right in your SWF file.

This requires Flash Player 8 or higher. More »

In Lesson 01 we talked about doing the bulk of your drawing in Illustrator. For coloring the opposite holds true. Flash is far superior to illustrator for adding color to a drawing because it has a fill tool not unlike a bitmap editing app. Just click an enclosed space and, viola, its full of the good stuff. In Illustrator if you want the same functionality you can use the Live Paint Bucket, but it doesn’t work on shapes made by brushstrokes, open shapes, or on Tuesdays. It’s so complicated it gives you instructions every time you use it. Avoid. More »