Re: FLASH: Any knowledge of how Macromedia help movies were done?

[John Dowdell]

At 3:05 PM 2/15/99, Scott Wilkinson wrote:

> I can't help but be impressed by the help movies Macromedia created for

> the Flash and Dreamweaver help files. Watching them, I started wondering

> how they were executed.


As you and Valerie discussed, these ShowMe movies were indeed created in

Director.


Instead of straight screen captures these use "sprite animation". A

Shockwave sprite is similar to a Flash symbol: a given object is

consistently reused, with different display instructions each frame, and

the whole is composited on the fly at runtime. This compares with the

pixel-by-pixel description done by screen-capturing tools.


The ShowMe's growing and revealing text captions are accomplished by the

built-in programmatic transitions... it's much cheaper to say "here's some

text, make it gradually appear" than it is to describe which pixels should

be which color in which subframe.


Screen-capture tools can be great for demos if (a) the deadline is short,

(b) delivery bandwidth is not an issue, and (c) special effects are not

needed. Sprite-based animation has the disadvantage of taking more labor

than just pressing a "record" button, but can give qualitatively superior

results and much smaller file sizes.


(I'm glad you enjoyed those ShowMe movies... they really helped me learn

about some of the features in question, and they buttress printed material

quite well.)


jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/


Offlist email risks capture by the spam filters! I may not see your

email if it's not on the list. Private one-on-one email options are

available via Priority Access: http://www.macromedia.com/support/




------------------------------------------------------------------------

To UNSUBSCRIBE send: unsubscribe flasher in the body of an

email to

list-managershocker [dot] com

.  Problems to:

ownershocker [dot] com

N.B. Email address must be the same as the one you used to subscribe.

For info on digest mode send: info flasher to

list-managershocker [dot] com