Tutoriaux - Flash

Introduction

Flash animations are graphs and vectorial interactive animations mainly intended for Website but more and more used to create some ‘little’ cartoons. These animations could contain as well pictures (JPG, GIF) as vectorial drawings, some texts and sounds.

To read these animations, you need the « Flash Player ». It’s a free plug-in available on the adobe website . You just have to set it up on your computer and after that, the animations will run in the browser like an independent application.

Flash produces several types of files:

'.FLA': the work file format. This file is editable in Flash.
'.SWF': the exported file, which is read by the player. This file is not editable. It's the file you’ll upload on the network.
'.HTML' files, which will be upload on the network too, and whose function will be to call the '.swf' file in the browser window.

Flash produces also other export files format. These formats allow people to read the animation without de 'flash player'. For example, the '.MOV' format which is read in the 'Quicktime' software; the '.AVI' format, also a video format, and the .GIF format which allow people to create some 'animated GIF'.

All the flash animations could be created by diverse ways. These different ways will weight down or not the size of your file and thus, the download time.

Light : The animation is composed by vectorial drawings.
Medium : The animation is composed by drawings and pictures.
Heavy : The animation is composed by pictures, sounds, video.

It's obvious that for an animation intended to be web published, the weight of the file is a primordial factor! However if your animation is meant for another support (for example : a video-clip), the size of your animation could be higher.