Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Incorporating Video

In the past few years, Flash has become the video champion of the Internet. You find Flash video on sites from YouTube to Hulu to CNET. It wasn't long ago that a battle royale raged among Microsoft, Apple, and RealMedia for web video bragging rights. Flash was seldom mentioned in the contest; after all, it was just for making little animations. But, like the Trojans with their famous horse, Flash Player managed to sneak onto about 90 percent of today's computers. And guess what? Flash does video, too. It's easy for you to add video to a web page or any other project by adding it to a Flash animation. It's easy for your audience, too, since they don't have to download and install a special plug-in to watch your masterpiece. Flash is also fueling the recent surge in video blogging, or vlogging—adding video clips to plain-vanilla blogs. You can find out more at sites like www.vidblogs.com or http://mashable.com/2009/10/09/video-blogging.

Figure 11-6. The sound file you see here is a two-channel (stereo) sound, so you see two separate waveforms, one per channel. To crop the sound clip, drag the time in and time out control bars left and right. Flash ignores the gray area during playback and plays only the portion of the waveform that appears with a white background, so here Flash plays only the second half of the waveform. To create a custom fading effect, you can drag ...