>If someone started debating the concept of using MC with "Why don't you just
>do that in Flash" i.e. pushing Flash as a primary development environment
>over MetaCard, what would be ten reasons you would give in response? I tried
>Flash once (before Flash 4.0 came out) and it felt like someone had "hog
>tied me" compared to the ease of working in XTalk and we decided not to
>bother learning it. It seemed to me to be a useful animation program, if you
>wanted to spend all that time and money to make people dizzy when they
>opened their web page (just joking, I'm sure it has mature uses), but beyond
>that too constrained an environment to build anything robust with any ease.
>But I would like some points from the sages on this list to take to the
>table. Thanks.
I'm sure others are doing the same, but I'm using Flash 4 to generate
a series of 30 sec animated cartoons for the training points of a CBT
package I'm developing in MetaCard. Each animated sequence starts
with a blue matt, fades into the sequence and then fades back to a
blue matt with summary points in yellow text. Also, every sequence
has an accompanying voice-over.
I use "Sound Studio" on a Mac to record voice-overs in AIFF format
(8bit, 22k, mono). I use QuickTime Player Pro to convert the Flash
SWF file into a QT movie and add the voice-over (converted from AIFF
to QT). Producing QT movies this way gives the smallest file size
for very good quality. A typical 30 sec animated sequence at 8fps is
about 750Kb in the form of a QuickTime movie file. This compares
extremely well with any form of real video.
A professional cartoonist provides me with graphical components in
the form of Flash libraries. I then produce animated sequences
within Flash using these components. I found it better to produce
the voice-over outside Flash and use QuickTime Player to put the
animation and voice-over together. Also, QuickTime Player does a
better job of generating QT movies than exporting from Flash 4.
I use MetaCard's player objects to deliver the animated sequences
which the user chooses from a list of subjects. The list of subjects
and associated video clips are read from a text file at start-up,
giving me the flexibility to change the subjects and animations by
simply editing these text files.
I'm sure the above is a classic "grandma sucking eggs" thing, but I
thought I'd throw in my own experience of combining Flash with
MetaCard.
Cheers
Peter
--
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Peter Reid
Reid-IT Limited, Loughborough, Leics., UK
Tel: +44 (0)1509 268843 Fax: +44 (0)870 052 7576
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Web: http://www.reidit.co.uk
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