Jimco Software Reviews - Macromedia Flash MX Professional and Macromedia Video Kit(continued)
ActionScript
ActionScript is a powerful scripting language built into Flash. In fact, the term scripting is a bit misleading because ActionScript is actually a full-fledged, object-oriented language for controlling Flash movies. Even with the power and complexity that ActionScript provides, Macromedia has made it fully available to everyone using the Actions pane (shown in figure 5 ) and documentation.
Figure 5 - The Action Pane
As you can see, code can be inserted easily via the user-interface. You will often have to add some of your own movie-specific information to the code, but the documentation will walk you through that. A comprehensive examination of ActionScript is beyond the scope of this review. If you're interested in examing the power and functionality provided by ActionScript, we recommend that you download the Flash trial version from Macromedia. Macromedia provides exhaustive documentation on ActionScript and its capabilities.
Documentation
There's obviously no way that we can possibly describe all of the features available in Flash. Fortunately, Flash's documentation is second-to-none and all of the information you need is at your fingertips every step of the way using the Help pane shown in figure 6 .
Figure 6 - The Help Pane
Macromedia regularly updates Help content and getting updated content is as simple as clicking the Update button at the top of the Help pane. It's quite obvious that Macromedia takes documentation seriously and that fact adds significantly to the usability of their products. In fact, that's why we rated Flash's usability as a 5 out of 5. The documentation is top-notch.
Video in Flash
We've had a video thing going for a while, so we can't do a review of Flash without having a look at some of its video capabilities. Truth is, we'd cover this anyway because Flash has some powerful tools in this area.
Figure 7 - Media Components
Figure 7 shows the Component panel in Flash with the Media Components node expanded. There are three Media Components to choose from; the MediaController, MediaDisplay, and MediaPlayback. (The MediaPlayback component is a combined MediaController and MediaDisplay.) These components are designed to playback either Flash video or MP3 audio. Video is expected to be in FLV (Flash Video) format. Flash ships with a video exporter for many popular video applications so that you can easily convert your video to Flash Video format. If you don't have any of the supported products, pick up a copy of SWiSHzone.com's SWiSHvideo and you'll be set.
Note: Macromedia produces a Flash Video Kit for Dreamweaver that runs $99. Included in this is a copy of Sorenson Squeeze 4.0 for creating Flash video files (Dreamweaver not required.) We'll talk about that a bit later in this review, but we wanted to mention it here because it's what we used to encode the video for this review and the results were much better than we could obtain with other tools and it produced significantly smaller files.
Once you've inserted a Media Component into your Flash movie, you configure it via the Component Inspector shown in figure 8 . In this case, we're configuring a MediaPlayback component. As you can see in figure 8 , you can configure how the controller is displayed as well as many other aspects of the component. The component can also be databound and that can be configured here as well.
Figure 8 - Configuring a MediaPlayback Component
The only setting that is required in order to display video is the URL of the movie file itself relative to the movie file. We've set that in figure 8 to reveille.flv. After specifying the URL, we generated our movie and here is the result. From this simple example, you can see the quality of video that the Flash Video format is capable of producing. We chose this particular snippet of a recent video we created because it has several qualities that will normally make compression look terrible. First of all, it has rapid motion in the beginning as we drive past the riding mower. It also has text in the video at the end. You'll notice that even with these difficult qualities, the video looks quite good, the text is highly legible, and the audio sounds great! Total file size? Hold on to your hat because you won't believe this... 895KB. That's right. Under 1MB for 30 seconds of video. That means that even users with a slow Internet connection can still enjoy video, and if you're producing for a broadband audience, it's quite easy to produce large, TV quality videos that playback smoothly.
To see the controller in the example video, simply hover over the bar at the bottom of the video. The video controller (shown in figure 9 ) will slide down from the bottom of the video. (When you are configuring the video, you can choose where the controller is docked.) The controller is attractive and adds a professional touch to your video presentation.
Figure 9 - The Flash Video Controller