odeathoflife opened this issue on May 06, 2002 ยท 5 posts
Rork1973 posted Wed, 08 May 2002 at 10:40 PM
What are you talking about, man ? :) A plugin to export a flash file ? You must be joking....I wish it was that simple to work with flash =) All those 'with our newest version you can export to flash' stories are just to increase sales or to make it look kool. But that's not the way it works. The only thing you could create in another program is just graphic elements. To cut down on size, with bigger projects you mainly use vector graphics instead of normal raster. That's why you would need either Illustrator or Freehand - the tools Flash has got aren't enough to make special graphics. But what you do is save it as EPS for instance, and open that in Flash & put it in your object library as a graphic. Since Flash is able to open a lot of different formats, there is no use for a plugin to export it to a flash movie straight away. The only exception is when you make a little animation in layers, which can indeed be exported as flash movie - but that's very amateur stuff and not made as an alternative to (basic) flash. So if you need to make graphic elements for your boss in Photoshop, you should use paths to make the shapes you want & save as EPS. He/she will be able to use it in Flash. But if you wanna get into flash in a normal/serious way, you can't do without Illustrator or Freehand, but most of all you need the control that Flash hands you. It's not at all difficult to get into, but you'll need to be able to understand how it works, so you can plan your projects (animations, navigation, etc) ahead and even for the most simple sites you still need to know how (action) scripting works. I might be wrong, but Flash has a 30 day trail...and it's got no restrictions, so if you go to www.macromedia.com you can try out Flash for a month (it's got pretty easy and good tutorials). Well, sorry if I'm talking too much - if you need any help, feel free to IM or email me.