Migrating from Flash 8 to Flash CS3 Professional
Table of Contents
Enhancements to using video in Flash
There are a number of improvements to the video workflow in Flash CS3. Now there is an easy way to add captions to video that plays in Flash, and an easy way to save cue points from an FLV file, or load cue points to apply to a new FLV file. And finally, exporting to QuickTime just made animation for broadcast video much easier—now you can export any kind of animation to an MOV file.
Enhanced support for QuickTime video
In previous versions of Flash, QuickTime export was limited in that you couldn't export animations that contained movie clip animation or scripted animation. This was a problem for those of you who wanted to export to a video format in order to create animations intended for playback on a television (broadcast or DVD), or if you wanted to further edit your animations using a video-editing tool. Flash CS3 has improved export to QuickTime format, so you can now export code-based animations, movie clip animations, and more. This affords you the flexibility of creating an animation however you prefer, and then exporting it to the QuickTime format.
For a video tutorial about exporting QuickTime files, see Exporting QuickTime files.
Save and load cue points and the FLVPlaybackCaptioning component
Now, you can save cue points from an FLV file or load cue points to apply to a new FLV file. The new Cue Points tab in the Flash Video Encoder lets you save any cue points that exist in an FLV file, which you can then apply to a different FLV File. Additionally, you can create a cue points XML file that's based on timecode, and then import that document into Flash Video Encoder before you encode the FLV file. This makes it much easier to add cue points to an FLV file, because you don’t need to manually add each one using Flash Video Encoder. Simply click the button shown in Figure 39 to load captions into Flash Video Encoder, then you can apply them to the FLV file that you're encoding.
Figure 39: Add cue points to your FLV files using Flash Video Encoder, either by loading them in, or using the Cue Points tab.
You use the FLVPlayback component, new in Flash 8, to play back FLV files in an application. You can use the FLVPlaybackCaptioning component to add closed captioning support to a video file that plays in FLVPlayback. The component adds a toggle button control, which lets the user turn captions on or off. You can also add several videos with several captioning instances to a single application. You can choose to either use a Timed Text XML file to add captions (which is a W3C standard XML format), or you can add captions using embedded event cue points.
Figure 40: A new video component in Flash CS3.
You can learn about how to use the FLVPlaybackCaptioning component in product documentation. See Using the FLVPlayback Captioning Component for more information.
The FLVPlayback component has been updated to ActionScript 3.0. The primary change in Flash CS3, however, is the FLVPlaybackCaptioning component addition. For more information on the update of the FLVPlayback component to ActionScript 3.0, see Using the FLVPlayback Component.
