Flash Movie Clips and DVD

For nested animation cycles, Flash animators have grown used to working with Graphic symbols instead of movieclips. That is, when you create a walk cycle, you'd put it inside a Graphic symbol and tween it across the stage. We don't use movieclips for two reasons:

1. Previewing purposes - because within the authoring environment, when you scrub the root timeline or press Enter to see the playback, any animation nested within movieclips cannot be previewed. So if you have a walk cycle within a movieclip which is tweened across the stage, you'll only see the first frame of the cycle sliding across, unless you test the movie (Ctrl + Enter). That's when you see all the animation working properly.
   
   
   
2. Video Export purposes - because when you export to *.avi, *.mov or even an image sequence, only the first frame of movieclips are exported. So again, you only see the first frame of the movieclip sliding across the stage.
   Actionscript doesn't export to video either, so things like the vCam (see yesterday's article) and actionscripted particle effects won't export.
   

So the reason animators nest their animated cycles within Graphic symbols is because they can be previewed from the authoring environment (by scrubbing the main timeline) and they do export to video formats and image sequences.

Along comes Flash 8 with amazing new Filters (blur, drop shadows, glow, etc) and we all want to use them.. but wait, they only work on movieclips!

That's when we turn to a lovely little program called SWF2Video. It acts as a kind of Flash Player that captures and renders the frames of the movie as they play. This means that anything goes.. actionscript, blurred movieclip animation, vCam.. all can be exported to video formats and image sequences. Which is exactly what you need in order to put your Flash work on a showreel DVD, or to create stuff for broadcast.

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As you may have already seen, today's Animotd #11 is a bit gross.. not for the kids (at least those kids who wanna grow up to be weight-lifters). As usual, download the rough FLA by clicking the image below:

This file is MX 2004, but the finished Animotd is Flash 8

You'll also notice the format of Animotd has changed from a calendar to a countdown of 30 shorts. As I said the other day (see post below), when I've finished this 30, I'll get back to work on Brackenwood.