Lesson 1
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Flash Tool Bars and PanelsWell, we are going to go through all the tools (almost) in the tool bar, then we’ll go into panels, and then layers and Keyframes. You’ll love it. But first, we need to talk about pixels and vectors. It’s important. Really. I’m going to cover some Flash Basics. This concepts are very important. I know, you want to build a website that has a rocket ship like in Star Wars. Before you do that, you need to know the basics. Before you win the World Series, you need to know which end of the bat you should hold before you swing at the ball. |
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What is a pixel? A pixel is defined as the smallest picture element. As you look at this computer monitor, all of the text, background colors and images are made up of little squares called pixels. Your computer monitor may be set to the size of 800 by 600 pixels. That comes to 480,000 little squares that let you see stuff on the monitor. Each square has a Red, Green and Blue value (rgb). If you have a picture of your Mom and that picture is 2 inches by 2 inches and you want to make Mom bigger, in other words, you want the picture to be 4 inches by 4 inches, well, you can do that. But it takes those little squares that make up Mom and it stretches them out. This is called up scaling, and I call up scaling, “The work of the devil!” Don’t do it. It distorts the image. That is what happens when you upscale images made of pixels. |
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What is a Vector? When you use the drawing tools in Flash, tools such as the oval tool, the rectangle tool, the pencil tool or the paint brush tool, these are not pixels , these are vectors. Vectors are mathematical formulas that define shapes. This topic could go on for eight years, and we don’t have that much time so take my word for it. Vectors are up or down scalable. You can make them big or small and there is no distortion. Because they are mathematical formulas and not pixels, they keep file size down. I keep bringing up file size, because if you a developing for the internet, then you want to keep you file size down. I try to keep all of my files less than 45 k. You have to remember that though everyone is always talking about dsl , t1 and cable internet access, half of the planet is on slow connection lines that download a web site at the speed of 56.6. That’s slow. So if you put big files on the net, let’s say a file that is 5 meg, then it’s going to take a person about 3 days before your page loads (Ok, not quite 3 days, but a long, long, time). What do you do when something takes a long time to load? You leave the site and you don’t return. To keep you file size down, use vectors as much as you can. Again, anytime you use the oval, rectangle, pencil, or paint brush tools, you’re using vectors. Vectors consist of two things, Fill and Stroke. Let’s say you draw a circle with the oval tool. The line around the oval is the stroke, and the color in the middle is fill. |
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(you may have to rewind to play the movie above) |
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Let’s Try It. 1. Select the oval toll2. Drag to make an oval 3. Look at the two colors of the oval, the line around it is stroke, the color in the middle is fill. 4. Select the black arrow tool in the tool bar , click and drag the middle of your oval and watch what happens. 5. The Fill moves, the stroke stays behind. What a pain. 6. To move stroke and fill at the same time, double click the oval. Notice that both become selected, now you can move them together. |
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