So, you've seen Flash, you've learned a little about it, but your work is beginning to seem a little stale now. You need new ideas, new paths.
Think about the best sites you've seen recently. What do they have in common? Very little, if they're any good. Except that they're probably designed in Flash and probably feature some Rich Media - sound and video - content.
What's the way forward on the web? What's going to make you stand out? The answer is simple: cutting-edge sound and video content. The application is less simple: sound and video elements have to fit through the limited bandwidth offered by the web, and Flash itself wasn't designed with all these uses in mind.
This book solves these problems. Divided into two comprehensive, separate sections on video and on sound, it uses the expertise of top professional web designers to show you how to design bandwidth friendly rich media Flash sites.
This includes comprehensive coverage of using Flash with the third-party technologies available for web sound (Cubase, Acid, Sound Forge) and web video (After Effects, Wildform FLIX, Flash Turbine, QuickTime, RealVideo, Premiere, Final Cut Pro).
This material is illustrated by fully worked case studies throughout, backed up with comprehensive video, audio and Flash files on the accompanying CD. Whether you're interested in preparing or recording sound for the web, filming video for the web, Flash, or web design in general, this is a bold book that you can't afford to miss.
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.
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