Adobe Fireworks CS3 Tutorials
Creating Slideshows & Animations / Using Fireworks Graphics in Flash
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Fireworks CS3 / Creating Slideshows & Animations / Using Fireworks Graphics in Flash)
You can place Fireworks graphics into a Flash file in a number of ways. Importing, or copying and pasting a Fireworks PNG file offers you the most control over how the graphics and animations will be imported into Flash. However, you can also important JPG, GIF, PNG, and SWF files that haven't been exported from Fireworks. Now, I should point out that when Fireworks graphics are imported or copied and pasted into Flash, some of your attributes will be lost. It's pretty unpredictable actually exactly what will be lost, and it never actually transports over exactly how you wish. I can tell you that many of the Live Filters and Textures will be lost. You also cannot import or copy and paste a Contour Gradient effect from Fireworks into a Flash document. In addition, Flash supports only solid fills, gradient fills and basic strokes. Let me go ahead and demonstrate some of my favorite ways of getting Fireworks graphics into Flash. First, let's just choose this animated symbol here and copy it, and now let's open up Flash, and simply Edit, Paste, and Center. Now notice that when you do copy and paste from Fireworks into Flash you'll get this Import Fireworks dialog which gives you a little bit more control over how the import will proceed. For example, you can import the graphic as a single flattened bitmap. This is probably the most reliable, and the most consistent method, but it doesn't give you a lot of options. You can also import into a current frame as a movie clip or as a new layer. You can also keep your objects imported as bitmaps to maintain the appearance. Keep all the paths editable. For your text you can import as bitmaps to maintain their appearance, or keep all the text editable. Let's go ahead and click OK. Now notice that this is a movie clip, if you're not familiar with Flash. If you double-click on it, notice you have a series of frames here. Now the frames are a little bit different than what you had in Fireworks, so again, each file tends to import a little bit unexpectedly. I have, some attributes are maintained, but others are not. The bottom line is usually there's some editing and modification that you need to do in Flash to get your Fireworks animation to behave the same way. Cutting and pasting is the fastest, and perhaps easiest method for moving graphics and animations from Fireworks into Flash. However, I usually import my files, my PGN files, directly into Flash. So, let's try that method. Let's move this over here and let's go ahead and choose from the Flash's Main Menu, File, Import. Let's import directly to the stage, and now let's just browse to the location of my animation. There it is. Notice that I get this same dialog, "Import Fireworks Document." I can import as a single, flattened bitmap. Here I also have some Page Options that I didn't have before. In the file that I'm importing, the PNG file, I only had one page, but if I had multiple pages, I can import each of those pages as separate graphics. I can import into the current frame as a movie clip, as I did before, import as bitmaps to maintain appearance, or keep all paths editable, and then similar options for my text. Let's go ahead and keep these as the default and click OK. And in this case Flash imported the file in much the same way, but again, notice that there are some differences here from the Fireworks document. Actually there are some differences here between important and copying and pasting. When I import it, it looks like some of my images are missing. So this is a good illustration of just how unpredictable it can be to import or cut and paste graphics into Flash. Let me conclude my demonstration with one more import. Let's import a different Fireworks file. I have several animations here. Here's Animation number 1. Let's go ahead and keep the defaults and, in this case, now, in this case it was importing it to this movie clip to a single frame of the movie clip, it looks like Frame 2. Let's go back to scene 1 and re-import to the stage that animation file. It's giving me a warning that one or more Library items already exist in the document. Let's go ahead and replace that existing item, and there is my animation and again, in this case, as in the last case, I'm missing some graphics there. In fact, it looks like only the very first frame got imported into Flash. So that one has some problems. As a further demonstration, let me show you what the animation should look like here in Fireworks. That's the Animation 1 file, and if I play this, that's what it should have done. So, you can see in this case I only really had a successful import of one of my two Fireworks animations, and even the one that was successful wasn't quite the same in Flash as it is here in Fireworks. Here's the Fireworks' animation. Now let me demonstrate the Flash animation. Actually it was this one that imported better, so there's my animation in Flash. It did go in, but it is different. So there you have a good representation of some of the difficulties that you will run into when importing or copying and pasting Fireworks animations into Flash. That'll wrap up this section of the tutorial on creating slide shows and animations. In this section, you've learned how to create slideshows and how to modify slideshow properties. You've learned how to work with animation symbols, how to modify those animation symbols. You've learned how to create Frame Tweening animations, as well as how to export your animations out of Fireworks. In this last movie, you learned some techniques for using Fireworks graphics in Flash.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Fireworks CS3 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33836 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-42-9 |
| Release Date: | 2008-01-25 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 93 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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