Basic - The Basics in Flash

Although i'm supposed people that browses into this blog would have a minimum level of understanding on how Flash works, i assume. But i'll start with something light before i move on to something more advance, involving typing out custom scripts and so on.

The Basics
Just like any other software, your Notepad/SimpleText(Mac), you have to go to File -> New before you can start to do anything inside the software, the tools are standard where you can use some of the tool to draw, resize, delete, arrange your objects and so on.
Like mine, i have my Action-Frame panel opened, which is then used to write simple ActionScript. But you'll only have to understand how the Properties panel at the bottom of your screen work at the start. Because it will help you a lot in making things easy for you.




Upon opening new document, please observe the Properties panel at the bottom of your screen. There are some settings that you'll have to observe and understand what every each of it does and affect your Flash movie. It is not crucial to understand every single of it but it's useful if you do.



If you notice, there are few fields that you can adjust on the spot, such as Frame rate/Fps and with other miscellanous information about your Flash movie file. Click on the Size : 550 x 400 to check with what setting you can adjust for your new Flash movie file.


Dimensions : Setting a value for this will define the space that your movie will be, the default value would be 550px * 400px.
Background colour: Define what background colour that you want your movie to be
Frame rate : By default 12fps (Frame per second) would be sufficient for a normal animation / navigation menu bar, but if you're working towards a complex and smooth movie/animation, you might think to adjust it to a slightly bigger value, but do beware and keep in mind, even if you set your movie frame rate to 60fps, but not every single computer are able to process so many frames per second as smooth as other computer, especially with older generation of computers, Flash movie files tend to run slower than usual because the CPU couldn't process so many objects or frame at one time, making the entire movie/browser slowdown or sometimes crash. The optimum and most used around are 30 - 60fps. Unlike movies, which are either 25fps/29.97 (PAL/NTSC format) Flash movies behaves differently although there are similiarity.

If you notice below the Size setting, there are also another Publish : Settings. I'll cover more on that on the next post, as it has something to do with Exporting your Flash files into HTML and some settings to optimize your Flash movie to run faster/smoother.

There won't be any FLA file for this tutorial as it's just an introductory towards the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 interface.

Have fun.
ManMeng