Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Templates

While symbols let you reuse images and series of frames, templates let you reuse entire Flash documents. In this section, you see how to use Flash's prebuilt templates and how to create your own. In Flash CS5, templates are helpful in several ways:

• Use Adobe's predesigned templates as a project starting point. For example. the Advertising templates start you off with the stage set to web advertising standards like 120 x 600 Skyscraper or 234 x 60 Half Banner. Among the Media Playback templates, you'll find templates to create photo albums.

• Use Adobe's predesigned templates as learning examples. The Animation and Sample Files templates show how to use advanced techniques such as tweens, masks, and easing. These are working examples, which you can learn from by experimenting and analyzing them (as of this writing, these templates contain no written instructions). Still, if you want to learn how to create random effects with ActionScript, you can study the code in the Scripted Rain or Scripted Snow templates.

• Create your own templates to save time and ensure consistency. Suppose you create marketing animations for display on your corporate website. You always use your company's logo and copyright notice, the same stage size and color palette, a copyright notice, the same sound clips of your CEO speaking, and the same intro and credit scenes. By creating a template with these elements, you can save yourself a lot of time, and you ensure consistency among your animations (highly ...