Subtitles of the Movie

Creating a Flash project typically involves performing the same basic steps. The first step is to plan you're application, you'll want to decide which basic tasks the application will perform and what features the project will have. You'll usually start here on the welcome screen where you can open a recent item, create a new item or create an item from a template. If you're creating a new item you need to decide whether you'll be creating a Flash file using ActionScript 3, ActionScript 2, a Flash mobile file, an ActionScript file, ActionScript communication file, JavaScript file or a Flash project. Our basic project here in this tutorial will be using a Flash file with ActionScript 3.0, they'll be times when we move over to ActionScript 2.0 or perhaps an ActionScript file. But Flash ActionScript 3.0 will be our basic file format that we will use in this tutorial. The next step is to add media elements, you can create or import media elements, such as images, video, sound and text. You'll be creating Flash elements using the Flash tools here in the tools window. This will include things such as text, lines, shapes such as polygons, circles, rectangles as well as the pencil tool and the brush tool and so on. If you're gonna be importing elements you'll usually use the file, import menu where you can import to the stage, to the library, to an external library, you can also import video. And Flash supports a wide variety of media types, including bitmap files from Photoshop, vector files from Illustrator, PNG files from Fireworks, as well as a range of other graphic formats. You can also import images and assets from other Flash files, such as these that I have here. These imported files and media elements will appear here in the library. Where there is a viewer at the top where you can see those media elements. The next step is to arrange the elements here on the stage, also arrange the elements in time using the timeline above the stage. You'll do this to define when and how these various project elements will appear in your project. Next is to apply special effects, you can apply graphic filters such as blurs, glows, and bevels as well blends and other special effects as you see fit. The next step is to use ActionScript to control the behavior of your projects including the elements inside the projects. You'll write this code to control how media elements behave and how they interact with each other and with the end user. The last step is to test and publish your application, you want a test to verify that your application is working as you intended and find and fix any bugs you encounter while testing your application. You'll publish your FLA file as a SWF file that can be seen on a web page and played back with the Flash player. Now depending on your project and your working style, you might use these steps in a different order. You may revisit some of these steps multiple times or skip steps all together. You'll create and manipulate your documents and files using various Flash elements, interface elements such as panels, bars and windows and you'll arrange these various elements into something that Adobe refers to as a workspace. When you first start an Adobe creative suite file you'll see default workspace up here under window. And the workspace options are down here, notice that there is a default workspace. In this case it expanded to fill my entire screen, some of it going off my recording window but I've also got icons and text workspaces. Icons only, I can also save my current workspace, and have customized workspaces that allow you to work in certain ways that you specify. Let's go ahead and save this workspace I've compressed it to fit my recording screen just right and I can save current and let's go ahead and call this the VTC workspace and we'll click OK. And now notice that I can go back and go back to my default workspace but my VTC workspace is right there now at that very top and clicking that brings me back to this compressed workspace that fits into my recorder. Although the default workspaces vary across the various applications in the creative suite, such as Flash Illustrator, Incopy, Indesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Fireworks. Many of the elements are laid out much the same way and are called the same things in many of them. All of them have a menu bar across the top of the application which organizes commands as well as sub commands and sub commands are contained where you see the little black triangle pointing to the right for the sub commands out here. The tools panel, is to the left, its called the tools palette in Photoshop, but everywhere else it's called the tools panel. It contains tools for creating and editing image elements. The control panel is down here in the bottom, all of the applications in creative suite have a control panel, it's a very important component in many of the applications. The stage is here in the middle it displays the file that your working on and then you have a variety of panels, which are sometimes called palettes in the other applications to help you monitor and modify your work. Specific examples of panels in Flash can be seen under the window command, properties notice is right there, library, actions, behaviors, debug panels, movie explorer, output, align, color, info, swatches, these are all panels. Panels can be stacked or docked as well, notice that I have a variety of panels over here. It can be resized as well as separated and used as free floating windows. Notice that I can stack them so that panels are accessible via these tabs here, in this case my color swatches and history panels. You can also remove or detach the tab and therefore create a panel in it's own floating window. Notice that I've got three floating windows now, I can also redock them back together into one panel, again accessible via these tabs at the top. I can close the panel by clicking on the close button in the upper right hand corner and the nice thing about the creative suite application is that once you learn the basic workspaces of one such as learning this one in Flash, the Dreamweaver workspace is that much easier to learn and master because many of the elements and components and the way these components interact are the same in all of the applications in the creative suite.