Subtitles of the Movie

Continuing from the previous movie, my review of new features found in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, we're still not done covering all the new Animation features. We now come to Motion Presets. These are prebuilt Animations that can be applied to any object on the stage to jumpstart your project and improve your production efficiency. If we choose Window from the Main menu, Motion Presets, that'll bring up this Motion Presets panel that shows me previews of these various preset Animations. Let's go ahead and, with my symbol selected there on the stage, let's choose Wave and click Apply, and then notice that that preset Animation is applied to that object. Let's go ahead and hide that layer and open up this Text layer, and let's try to apply the Text Scroll 3D to this text object that's selected, click Apply. The selected item cannot be tweened with 3D properties, you must convert this to a movie clip. Let's go ahead and do that. Click OK, and now there is my Star Wars-type tween Animation of a Text Scroll 3D, pretty clever, very, very efficient. Yet another new Animation tool is Inverse Kinematics with the Bones tool. That's this tool right here in the toolbar. This lets you create chain-like Animation effects with a series of linked objects or quickly distort a single shape using the new Bones tools. Probably the best example I can show you here is on the Adobe website, and they have an example of a Crane Animation, and they're going to apply a new movie clip to that and then draw out with the Bones tool a series of Armatures, and then notice you can move the object so that it rotates on the junction points of those Armatures, and then go ahead and animate it. So they're going to go ahead and now, once they've set up all the settings, there's the Animation of the Crane moving on those junctions, so that's the Inverse Kinematics with the Bones tool. You can also now turn symbols into instant design tools using the Deco tool and the Spray Brush Tool. You can apply symbols in a variety of ways like quickly creating kaleidoscope-like effects and apply Fills. Let me demonstrate here with the Deco tool. If I open up the Properties Inspector I can use the default shape for the flowers and the leaves, and create a series of flowers and leaves here. I can also change the defaults by adding any one of these symbols. Let's go ahead and do this one for the leaf, and let's do this one for the flower. Let's hide, create a new layer and hide that layer there. And now with those new symbols created I can create that pattern. I can also change it from a Vine Fill to a Grid Fill and do it like this. Let's go ahead and create another layer there, hide this one, and there's one more option and that is this one here, the Symmetry Brush like so, kind of interesting. You can also do the same thing with the Spray Brush Tool, create patterns using prebuilt symbols or I can choose a new symbol to spray on the page like that. Flash CS4 now has H.264 support. You can encode to any format recognized by the Adobe Flash Player runtime with Adobe Media Encoder, the same tool found in other Adobe video products. Now they all support H.264 video. Flash CS4 has a new improved Library that includes search capability. Users of Adobe Sound Booth can now edit imported sounds in Sound Booth directly from within Flash. The Adobe ASND Sound File format enables the non-destructive editing of sound files. The new XMP panel enables users to quickly and easily assign metadata tags to their SWF content, do this. Let's go ahead and close this panel group here. The XMP panel is found under File, File Info right here. This enables you to add metadata into your SWF files that are recognized by Adobe Bridge and other Creative Suite applications that recognize this XMP metadata. This will greatly improve your organization and enables the fast and easy retrieval of SWF files. Flash also has improved collaboration with Adobe Flex, which can edit code in Adobe Flex and then bring it into Flash CS4 Professional for finishing and production. You can also import code-only action script 3.0 SWC components that are developed in the Adobe Flex Builder software. One of my favorite new features is the Color Extension. Choose Window, Extensions, Color, and that brings up this very handy little color tool that lets you choose attractive color combinations based on a website that Adobe produces. This one here, http://color K U L E R. adobe.com. Visitors to this website rate provided color schemes. Here are some of the most popular color schemes from the website, and then you can go ahead and use these in your Flash projects. I use this Color tool all the time with students and clients. I use it myself to find attractive color combinations. You can even save your own color combinations. It's really nice on this site here as you can create colors based on design rules, color theory. Here in the Create link, this allows you to create monochromatic colors, analogous colors, compound colors based on any base color here. So very handy, an extension of this website now integrated right into Flash as the Color Extensions panel. So there you have what I think are the most important new additions in the CS4 version, the new version of Flash Professional. For additional new features be sure to visit the Help website and just type in New Features in Flash CS4 Professional, and you get a full list of all of the new features in addition to the ones that I've covered here. Let me now move on to the next section of the tutorial and review the Flash Workspace including Flash authoring file types, Flash workspaces, the important Workspace elements, and much, much more.