QuickStart! - Adobe Flash CS3 Course

Hello and welcome to this quick review of Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, as you would expect from a major software release from Adobe, Flash CS3 Professional has undergone quite a bit of upgrading from the previous version of Flash, Flash 8 Professional. If you visit the Flash page on the Adobe website and scroll down a ways you'll get a list of some of the new features in Flash CS3 Professional including some reasons to upgrade. Which include enhanced Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator import upgrades, animation conversion to ActionScript, a new streamlined interface, ActionScript 3.0 development and advanced debugger, user interface components and much, much more. To learn about some of these new features click on the learn about new features link and you'll get to a page that gives you a short description of some of the major enhancements. For example under the advanced debugger you can test content with a powerful new ActionScript debugger that offers greater flexibility and user feedback as well as consistency with Adobe Flexbuilder 2 debugging. Let me spend some time then In this movie, reviewing some of the more important of these new features in Flash CS3 Professional starting with the Adobe interface. You can now enjoy a new streamlined interface that emphasis consistency with the other Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Fireworks CS3. You can also customize the workspaces to improve workflow and maximize stage space. One of my favorite new features is copy and paste motion. You can now copy and paste motion to let you copy a motion tween and paste or apply the tween to frames, tweens, symbol information and all the rest of it to another object. When pasting the motion tween to another object you can also choose to paste all the properties associated with the motion tween or choose specific properties to apply to the other object. Let me demonstrate this with an example. I have here in this open file a simple animation of a rectangle spinning and changing size. I can select this entire layer here and copy that animation by choosing edit, timeline, copy, motion. Now I can only copy the motion within one layer, I can't copy motions that transcend multiple layers. So I'm gonna create another layer into the blank key frame there I'm gonna drop another symbol of the rectangle, notice that the second rectangle is larger then the first one. Then I'll select that rectangle there, the new one and choose from the main menu, edit, timeline, paste motion, notice that the size immediately changes and the animation is duplicated in the new object. Now I can also do this with other symbols in the library, doesn't have to be the same symbol but it does have to be a symbol, it can't animate a graphic. So, let's drop symbol number two, onto my new layer and because I've already got the motion copied to the clipboard I can just simply choose timeline. Paste motion and the new animation is also applied to the oval symbol. Notice that all three of them are animating in unison there. Now if you only want to copy certain attributes of the motion tween you can choose edit, timeline, paste motion special that'll bring up the paste motion special dialog where you can pick and choose any of these options to copy over. Position, scale, rotation and skew, color filters and blend mode. You can also instantly convert timeline animations into ActionScript 3.0, these animations can then be added and edited and leveraged into other Flash projects and Flash files. Let's go ahead and copy my original animation here, I'm going to select that layer, and then from the main menu choose edit, timeline, copy motion as ActionScript 3.0, Flash will copy all of that motion converts it into ActionScript 3.0. It asks for an instance name to use in the script, I'll enter star. The ActionScript will call on this instance name in another document and apply all that animation to it. click OK, now I got another document all ready with a symbol on the stage. Let's open up the properties inspector and we need to make sure that, that instance name is spelled exactly the same as my prompt in the other document, so there it is. So the ActionScript is now on the clipboard. Let's go ahead and add a new layer, call it actions, enter the key frame then, I'm going to select it so I can paste all of the ActionScript that I saved previously into that key frame. Let's open up the actions window and let's paste the actions into the window. There's all the actions that define that animation for our star instance and now let's preview this in the browser. And notice the animation is identical to the original animation, the object is different but it's spinning and changing scale. Additional features include timesaving coding tools, you can focus on relevant code easier in the actions window here with code collapse and commenting. And you can now jump to code errors with the error navigation features. You've also got richer drawing capabilities. You can visually adjust shape properties on the stage with smarter shape drawing tools. You can also create precise vector illustrations with the new pen tool inspired by Adobe Illustrator. You can paste illustrations from illustrator CS3 into Flash CS3 Professional much more easily. Flash CS3 Professional also has enhanced QuickTime export, you can render content published in an SWF file as a QuickTime video using the advanced QuickTime exporter. Export content that includes nested movie clips or content generated with ActionScript and runtime effects such as drop shadow and blur. And lastly, Flash has some very sophisticated video tools; you can create, edit and deploy streaming and progressive download FLV content with comprehensive video support. You can also ensure the best video experience with the stand alone video encoder, alpha channel support, a high quality video codec, embedded cue points, video import support, QuickTime import, closed captioning and much, much more.