From the Publisher
With its low bandwidth and tiny file sizes, it is often wrongly assumed that sound and video can never achieve a really high level of sophistication in Flash animations. With competitive motion graphics techniques rapidly evolving, there is a constantly growing demand for the next stage in sophisticated design - video and sound.
This book will do exactly what they said wasn't possible by illustrating how video and sound can be integrated into your Flash presentations, placing you at the extreme edge of creative web design. The application of such tools as AfterEffects, QuickTime, SoundForge and Wildform test the boundaries of Flash and suggest ways to take sound and video beyond Flash and into the realms of Shockwave. Showing you how to break your site down and incorporate video and sound, the techniques covered in this book capitalise on the capabilities of Flash whilst tackling its limitations head-on. It will then look at how to take web ideo and sound a step further with Shockwave presentations.
Flash's tiny .swf files are great for quick-download animation, but adding more bandwidth-heavy sound and video elements has been seen until now as prohibitively difficult. Nevertheless, some of the top Flash designers have been breaking new ground by incorporating carefully optimized video and sound, streamed in to minimize download time. These designers, and their sites, have quickly stood out from the chasing pack of aspirant motion web designers.
There are a number of affordable third party pieces of software that can ease the use of video in Flash and Director and it is anticipated that this book will include tutorials that cover Wildform FX, AfterEffects, QuickTime and Beatnik amongst others. Rich Media Studio acknowledges the limitations of Motion Graphics packages and, using advanced tutorials focussed individually on sound and video, shows you how to work around the problems.
About the Author
Kristian Besley has worked with multimedia for three years, but has been creative with computers for much longer. He currently develops Flash-based material within an educational environment. This material includes interactive presentations to illustrate how scientific things work, as well as graphical user interfaces and tools allowing web-based content creation with basic computer skills. He was a contributing author on the seminal
Flash Math Creativity, and many other friends of ED books. In 2002, he launched the world's first bi-annual HTML markup-based TableArt competition. The competition was an unbelievable success.
Sham Bhangal has worked on books in new media for five years, during which time he has authored and co-authored numerous friends of ED books, including critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling titles like
Foundation Flash,
New Masters of Flash,
Flash MX Upgrade Essentials,
Flash MX Most Wanted, and the
Flash MX Designer's ActionScript Reference. He has considerable working experience with Macromedia and Adobe products, as well as other general web design technologies (such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.). In addition to speaking appearances at FlashForward, the biggest Macromedia Flash developer conference, Sham has also been a beta tester for Macromedia and Discreet products for a number of years.
A bio is not available for this author.
