Subtitles of the Movie

So what is Flash and why spend hours and days and months learning how to use it? Well Flash is a powerful authoring tool ideal for creating a variety of media-rich presentations and applications ranging from online games, greeting cards, web pages, playing back audio or video, or even an information portal. Here I have some examples from students to see what you'll be able to do pretty much right away. Here's a small website of about 5 or 6 pages. Here's another more animation driven website. Here's a Volume Slider that you can actually place in an existing webpage to give you audio Volume Control. Here's a standard application of Flash to create an opening or what I call a splash to a webpage or website with a simple animation. Flash makes it a snap to create applications containing pictures, sound, video, and special effects using simple animations or more complex interactive and self contained Flash movie elements. Flash is especially suited to creating content to be delivered over the Internet because its files are generally very small. Flash achieves this through its extensive use of Vector Graphics which requires significantly less memory and storage space than Bitmap graphics. Here's a file demonstrating the very simple tools, and there's very simple shapes that you can create with these tools. These are all Vector Shapes. Taking the application of these simple Vector Shapes and then animating them will yield results like this website here demonstrates a lot of the nice features of Flash. Even a short visit to Adobe's website demonstrating various examples of the Flash content like I just demonstrated will convince you of the power and versatility of this amazing tool. Here on the Adobe Flash CS4 Professional page of the Adobe website you'll see a lot of examples of features of Flash such as Object-Based Animation, Inverse Kinematics, 3D transformations, Motion Editor, Motion Presets, and much, much more. These are all the new features in the CS4 version of Flash which I'll be demonstrating in the next several movies. To summarize, Flash will provide rich, engaging presentations that download fast providing you strong control of both Visual and Audio Components, Scalability, Streaming Content, Outstanding Video Capabilities. It seems that every day my students and colleagues show me Flash work and websites that continuously amaze, pushing the envelope of what can be done with this tool. Flash is simply the best tool around if you have something that you wish to communicate with a lot of rich media but don't have a huge budget or several degrees in Computer Science to do it. So let me now move on to the next movie and demonstrate the new features in the CS4 version of Flash, and then move on and demonstrate some of the interface components and Workspace elements of Adobe Flash CS4.