Subtitles of the Movie

Each sound file used in the timeline in Flash requires a Sync Setting. You'll establish the setting here in the Properties Panel with the Sync Drop-Down. This setting dictates the behavior of the sound in the timeline and can have a drastic effect on the playback. In fact, often, if a student is having trouble with audio playback, I'll suggest that they start by adjusting the Sync Setting, changing it from one of these settings to one of the others. So let me in this movie review these various options in more detail. The default Sync is Event. With this option, sounds start playing as soon as the play head reaches the frame that holds this sound in the timeline. Event sounds will continue to play independently, even if the timeline stops. So if you stop the timeline or jump to another place in the timeline where that audio file WAV form is not present, the sound will continue to play. Another problem is if you jump around the timeline and you move back to a frame that does have an instance of that sound file, a second version of that sound file will play. So this option is better for short sounds such as button clicks or quick sound effects. The first three Syncs, Event, Start and Stop all load into memory and playback immediately but the Start Sync, which is exactly the same as the Event Sync, except that a second instance of the sound will not be started until the currently-playing instance has finished. This prevents the sound from overlapping itself. So for example, if you have a timeline in which you have a sound clip in Frame 1 to Frame 20, let's say, and you jump over to Frame 35 and then the user jumps back to Frame 1, notice that the play head will encounter the second instance of that sound clip if those instances sync's are set to Start. Only the first version of the file will play until it's all the way finished playing and then the second one will start up. So at any one time you only have one version of your song playing. This is a common mistake that I see in student projects. They will get multiple overlapping versions of the sound. What I usually instruct them to do is set up a different Sync for that sound, starting off with Start or perhaps using the Stream Sync. The Stop Sync stops the indicated sound. If the sound is set to Stop Sync it will play from start to finish no matter what happens in the timeline. But if you need the sound to stop, let's say at Frame 30, add a keyframe there, a blank keyframe at Frame 30, drag another instance of the sound clip onto Frame 30 and then set its Sync to Stop and it will stop that first instance of the music from playing back. Both the Start and the Stop Syncs are good for background sounds in which you maybe want them to play continuously no matter where the play head is. The last Sync Option is perhaps the most common; that's Stream. Using this setting the audio file is not downloaded to your user's computer. Instead it's streamed from your server. The Sync Setting of Stream streams the audio to keep pace with the action on the timeline. If the movie can not download its frames fast enough to keep pace, the Flash Player will force streaming sounds to skip frames. Stream sounds stop when the timeline stops or when another keyframe is encountered on the same layer. Since the audio is streamed with this Sync Setting, the audio begins to play before the entire sound file is downloaded. But there may be a slight delay if you have a very large sound file in order for enough of the sound file to load into the Flash Player's cache to then start playing so it won't be interrupted. Stream sounds are ideal for narration, animation and for music files. Generally I use this Sync for larger sound files or longer sound files that may not load into memory immediately or maybe take up too much memory. But I also build into my design when using Stream sounds that the Stream sound may not start right away, as soon as the sound is encountered here in the timeline. The last sound option here in the Properties Panel is the Repeat Loop Setting. This sets the number of times that the sound clip will repeat. The Loop Option sets the sound to play back continuously over and over and over again. The Repeat Option lets you specify the number of time the sound clip will repeat. If I double click on the Text Box and type in a five, that will specify for this sound clip to play back over five times. Now, once you've specified all of your settings here in the Properties Panel, close it and then test your file. Make sure that the sounds are playing back the way you want them to. The best way to do this is to do a Control Test Movie and there you can hear that sound playing back. You could also in some cases use the Enter Return Keys or the Control Play Movie to play back your sounds, although you need to be careful. This doesn't always play back the way you expect it. If the main timeline has more than one frame, you can then test Event and Start sounds using the Enter Return or Play Options and these sounds will play back in their entirety. Even if there are just two frames in the timeline but the sound takes 100 frames to play back, it will play back successfully. However, if you only have one frame in your timeline and you're using an Event or Stop or a Start Sync with that sound, the Enter Return Option or Control Play Option will not play back your audio file. Now, when the main timeline has more than one frame, Stream sounds can be tested using this Enter Return Option. Use caution however when using this method because if the number of frames in the timeline is fewer than the length of the sound or if another keyframe is encountered before the sound finishes, the sound will stop and be cut short. Stream sounds are tied directly to the main timeline so they'll behave a little bit different than Event or Start Sync sound. That then will conclude this section of the tutorial on working with sound in Flash CS4. In this section you've learned how to import sounds to the library, how to compress sound, how to play sounds on the timeline and then set the effects using the Edit Sound Envelope Dialog Box. In this last movie you learned how to set your Sound Sync Options. That'll bring us now to the next section of the tutorial on working with video where you will learn how to import video, about video compression, how to compress video in the Import Wizard and much, much more.