Incorporating Video
Flash animation is great for creating lots of things: cartoons, ads, presentations, tutorials, and interactive Web sites, to name a few. But sometimes, video footage is more effective. For example, video footage showing a live product demonstration, a kid blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, or an interview with a CEO can get a point across quicker than any other medium.
Note
One of the recent trends Flash is fueling is video blogging, or vlogging: adding video clips to plain-vanilla Web logs. You can find out more at sites like www.vidblogs.com and www.wearethemedia.com.
With Flash, you don't have to choose. You can import video files in a variety of formats (see Table 8-3) and incorporate them along with images, sounds, text, and interactive controls (such as buttons your audience can push to start and stop different sections of your video clips) to build unique multimedia animations. You can even apply effects to a video clip in Flash: for example, skewing and tinting.
Because Flash isn't set up to let you edit video files more than a few seconds long, most Flash jockeys do all their video production and editing in other specialized video editing programs (such as those listed in the box on Split a video clip). Then they export their video clips as separate .flv files, which they tie to their Flash animations using a bit of ActionScript code. This technique works great if all you want to do is display a video in Flash along with Play/Stop buttons (the ...
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