Design Center Tutorial
Creating a 3D button animation for Flash
Throughout our book, From After Effects to Flash, we concentrate upon the creation of QuickTime movies that are then subsequently converted into an FLV file and used on the Adobe® Flash® stage. This exercise is going to show a couple of different ways of using an animation created in Adobe After Effects®.
Though we are quite adamant throughout the pages of the book that embedding an FLV animation on the Flash timeline is evil, this is not necessarily true. Short animations of up to about 5 seconds can be embedded in Flash movies. The key, though, is to keep the physical size of the video as small as humanly possible.
Requirements
To complete this article, you will need the following software and files:
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Flash
Sample files:
Prerequisite knowledge:
Basic knowledge of working with After Effects and Flash
About the authors
Tom Green is a professor of interactive multimedia at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Ontario. He is the author of several best-selling books in the area of Flash and Flash technologies. His latest book is Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers, coauthored with David Stiller, and he recently completed an updated version of Foundation Flash CS3 Video, which will be available early in 2008. Tom has completed DVD videos for Lynda.com and Adobe Systems, and is a partner at Community MX and regular contributor to Digital-Web.com. He is also an active member of the Adobe Community Experts Group, speaking at conferences and seminars around the world and contributing regularly to the Adobe Developer Connection in the areas of Flash and video technologies.
Tiago Dias started to get into Flash around the time of Flash 3, after seeing his first Flash site. He started off by doing freelance work on the side from his day job as a network/systems engineer. On the motion graphics side of things, he got a lot of After Effects and Adobe Premiere® experience at multimedia school in Zurich. From those humble beginnings, he now works as a video producer and Flash developer at a corporate television and news production company based in London with subsidiaries around the world. This is Tiago’s ideal job, as it combines two of his favorite technologies! In his free time, he writes tutorials on Flash and After Effects for various communities, tries to go snowboarding every time the sun is shining in the Swiss Alps, or hops on a plane to visit new countries. He currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
Excerpted from “From After Effects to Flash” by Tom Green and Tiago Dias. © 2006. Used with the permission of friends or ED, a division of Elsevier. To purchase this book, please visit www.friendsofed.com
