Ever wanted to apply animations, alpha and masks to a dynamic text field without having to embed the entire font?
Easy!
Simply add a filter like alter color to the text field and it get’s rendered as a bitmap at runtime. Wow!
Here’s a nice design tip for those of you working on animations for CDROM or broadband projects. You can achieve a wealth of amazing effects very quickly by capturing areas of the screen as video when manipulating images using Photoshop or other graphics packages. All those sliders to alter blurs or outer glows etc can be used to serious effect and those transitions can be captured using tools like Snapz Pro or Camtasia and the video file imported back into Flash and integrated into your animations. Obviously it’s not a great solution for websites that require heavy optimisation but for multimedia stuff it can come in very handy.
Next stop those excellent wet media brushes in Corel Painter.
When using bitmaps to mask projectors in Zinc on OSX – bitmaps created on a Mac don’t load into the Zinc application – Zinc grays them out so making it impossible to export a masked projector.
Solution
Save a 24 bit .bmp file from Photoshop
Transfer the file to Windows
Open it.
Save it.
Transfer the bitmap back onto the Mac
Zinc should now pick it up okay in Finder.
To stop a table of images breaking apart when displaying HTML emails in Hotmail add the following style declaration to all your image tags.
style=”display:block;
Here’s how I do it.
PAL 16:9 displays using rectangular pixels at 720×576. unfortunately Flash uses square pixels so you will need to set up your Flash stage slightly wider than the video 1024×576.
I export the video in three ways.
1) Set your publish settings to Flash 5 and select the Formats tab and check the Qucktime with Flash Track (.mov) radio button to export the video directly. Unfortuantely this method only supports Flash 5 graphical elements for not funky line strokes or filter effects show up. – I was reading an article that explained that this doesn’t actually create a video file – it embeds the Flash movie inside a quicktime.mov
2) Goto File > Export > Export Movie > Then select PNG sequence from tdrop down Format box. – You then use After Effects or some such video program to import the series of images as frames of a video project – easy.
3) If you’re on a Mac you get to export Quicktime directly – this supports later versions of Flash so – you can use your strok effects and filters after all!
The last two options seems to work best for me – personally the third option seems to be the best at dealing with more complex Flash animations. If you don’t have a mac – option 2 is your best bet.
Set up a project in After Effects whos export setting are set to PAL 16:9 High Quality 720×576 Next you open your quicktime.mov or .png sequence in After Effects and export out a new quicktime.mov file – hey presto rectangular pixels!! Unfortuantely the file will look rubbish on your monitor because your monitor uses square pixels but once you get the Flash into a video compositing application like Final Cut Pro or Avid Xpress it will ping back to clarity suitable for broadcasting.
Tips: Be aware that until we all go digital, which is still a couple of years away TVs are rubbish. They display substantially less information than a monitor and their gamut of colours is much smaller. Broadcast Safe Colours are as follows:
RGB between 16 and 235
Pure white= 235,235,235
Pure black= 16,16,16
Good luck!
Boy this one got me in all kinds of trouble.
The problem is this – you develop your Flash CS3 Zinc application and everything works fine – you burn it to disk and it throws up all kinds of error messages when you auto launch.
The solution is this – save your application out of CS3 as Flash 8 – open it in Flash 8 and re-export it again. I run Zinc on Parallels running on a macBook Pro so I don’t know if anyone else has ever had this problem. Hope the tip helps!
How come colours look all washed out when I save for web on my MacBook Pro?
The answer is slightly more convoluted than I would have expected from a brilliant application like Photoshop – it’s all to do with colour profiles, gamma settings and monitor calibration. ‘Good grief’ I hear you cry. Fear not as I leap to your ‘save for web’ rescue.
Firstly download a brilliant shareware application called. SuperCal?
https://www.bergdesign.com/supercal/
Use the sliders to match the colours and set the brightness etc. It will create a brand new colour profile, try it as many times as your like until you’re satisfied.
One thing to note is set the Gamma on your monitor to 2,2 and your colour space to sRGB – the reason for this is simple – it makes your mac monitor behave more like the monitors that your end user would use to view web content. PC windows.
https://www.gballard.net/psd/saveforwebshift.html#srgb
Note: You’ll be in for a shock when your monitor is calibrated it’s like looking at the world after spending weeks looking through yellow tinted glasses.
Trust me it works! Unfortunately you may have to adjust some of your photoshop layers that were designed using a dodgy colour profile, but you’ll quickly get used to the more vibrant colours. That Dreamweaver icon never looked so green.
How come I never knew the following?
I’ve got a lot on fun ahead of me.
var myObject = {
firstname: “Patrick”,
lastname: “Wall”
getlastname: function(){return this.lastname;}
}
trace(myObject.firstname);
trace(myObject.getlastname());
In an attempt to learn classes and ratchet up my knowledge to the next level of useage I’m going to add some entries to my blog as I learn. So that I can chart my progress.
By declaring a GenericObject an external actionscript class of the same name is automatically called when the movie plays. For instance:
var myGenericObject:GenericObject=new GenericObject();
trace (myGenericObject);
will trace [object Object] from .as file with the name of GenericObject.as.
For instance:
class GenericObject{
}
The player automatically looks for it in the root directory and hey presto – you have created a class!
How many times must I try my _self targeted Flash links in IE only to discover that they open in new browser windows rather than into _self.
The following:
getURL(“https://www.google.com”, “_self”);
…doesn’t work in IE.
For future referrence – trash the target!
The following:
getURL(“https://www.google.com”);
…works!!
