Adobe Flash and Flash Video

This is the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop that comes with the
Creative Suite software. These are top notch tutorials.
 I highly recommend viewing these Flash tutorials as they cover
many valuable features of  Flash... including new uses of
video and the video encoder.

Part 1 of Digital Web Magazine's article The Rise of Flash Video (Tom Green, author). The FLV has become the de facto standard for video on the web and this is a good 3-part intro to Flash Video.

Part 2 of The Rise of Flash Video by Tom Green

Part 3 of Tom Green's The Rise of Flash Video. This one titled "Tackle your own project with this step-by-step primer." Very helpful with its illustrated, step-by-step instructions for using the FLVPlayback component as well.

No matter how you approach the subject, you have to understand that you really aren’t dealing with video. What you are doing is managing a stream of audio and video data into Flash Player.

Formats importable into the Flash Video Encoder are:
Active Streaming Format (.asf)
AVI (.avi)
DV (.dv)
QuickTime (.mov)
MPEG-4 (.mp4)
MPEG (.mpg, .mpeg)
Windows Media (.wmv)

Step by step, illustrated
 guide to using the Flash CS3 Vieo Encoder. Adobe Flash CS3 Video Encoder is a stand-alone video encoding application that lets you encode video in Adobe Flash video (FLV) format. The FLV format lets you incorporate video into a web page or Flash document in a format that can be viewed using Adobe Flash Player.

Step by step instructions for using the Flash Video Encoder.

Matthew David covers the pros and cons of using Flash Video and includes a short video tutorial to get you started. As he states, the number one supplier for Internet video is Flash.

Part one of this article by Tom Green.

Part 2 of Captions for Video with Flash CS3 by Tom Green

Flash Video Center at Adobe.... lots of good articles about Flash video (flv)

This learning guide introduces Flash video and provides you with tools for developing your skills.

Flash 8 . This tutorial explains how to take a vide file, convert it to FLV, and embed it directly into a web page using Dreamweaver 8. From Adobe's "Edge" Magazine. Does not make use of the Flash video component.

The chapter from Adobe's comprehensive guide "Using Flash" ... all about video.

Flash Video on Wikipedia

A brief history of ActionScript from its beginnings to AS3.

from Adobe Livedocs.

Programming ActionScript 3.0 from the Adobe webiste describes fundamental programming concepts in ActionScript 3.0, including the ActionScript language, event handling, object-oriented programming, data types, regular expressions, XML (E4X), networking, and Flash Player security.

senocular.com Tutorial. Comprehensive article with source files.

The first few chapters of this video are free. If you like them, you can sign up to view the rest. There are lots of other videos on this site as well.

compares worldwide ubiliquity of various versions of Flash Players.

Flash detection by setting your Publish Settings in Flash 8 & 9, and activating the Detect Flash Version check box prior to publishing. AFter you've published your files, the resulting HTML file contains all the code necessary to run effective detection, display alternate content to people with older versions of the Flash PLayer and show different alternate content to those with JavaScript disabled.

A trail of links to sites about Actionscript 3.

After trying a number of Flash embedding techniques, I've finally decided this is the one for me. SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

From the author of SWFObject: .....  Yes there is a problem somewhere in the flash player install process, but it's a very small problem overall.

Usually you can fix your computer by doing an uninstall/reinstall of the player.

It seems like this is a big issue from all the posts here, but in testing on a large website, we found that only 0.04% of people suffer from the problem.

SWFObject forum and faq. They are great at answering your questions.

Discusses various Flash embedding techniques including and recommending UFO and SWFObject.

These are the help files that come with Flash CS3

Browse to this page determines which version of the Flash player you have on your computer.

Limit Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. Use of sIFR is fine. And make sure there is a regular HTML link from a front all-flash splash page to a non-Flash HTML page.

Free samples from an extensive list of video tutorials, including Flash CS3, ActionScript 3.0, Illustrator CS3 and Flash CS3 Integration... plus Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flex, and LOTS more. View the free samples and if you like them, you can signup to view the rest.

According to Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google,  Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR),  when used in the manner for which it was intended, it's a perfectly acceptable solution for Google. Go to "How to Use" for step-by-step instructions.

SWFObject blog

Resources for learning ActionScript from Adobe.

Useful links to Flash pages and sites.

Flash photo gallery customizable by an external xml file with titles and descriptions possible for every picture. Purchase at istockphoto.com

A collection of Flash photo galleries downloadable from istockphoto.com ... all controllable by an external XML file.

Sources of sound for your flash movies. The mission is to record and share recordings of everything that we can hear and make it available to the world for free.

Superb, will illustrated, short video podcasts about how to use Flash.

some nice Flash video tutorials including ActionScripting 101

Video tutorials in graphic programs including Flash. Can be downloaded to your mp3 player.

Hugely valuable video tutorial which shows you how to create a mask with soft edges using transparency and a simple line of ActionScript.

This code creates realistic high quality tweens with easing and can be applied to any movie clip in your Flash movie. Using actionscript to animate greatly reduces the file size of your flash movies. Includes an illustration and explanation of the ActionScript.

A range of Flash tutorials, most of which include code (ActionScript).

Links to Flash Tutorials.

This tutorial will teach you how to create an interactive FLV video player that lets the user select which video to load at run time. All the video data will be saved outside the SWF file and will be streamed upon selection only. We will create this scene by making use of the FLVPlayback Component.

single image presentation tutorial

fade transition between images

create fades between images

The dynamicTextFeeder component provides a quick and easy way to load data dynamically from an external text file into a textfield or TextArea, without any coding.

Photo Transition Effect Tutorial ..... from LearnFlash.com

CheckPlayer [chekʹplāʹûr],(check-play-er) is a toolset for Flash Player plugin version detection, inline auto-updating, and easy SWF embedding on webpages. CheckPlayer augments the wonderful SWFObject 2.1 Library. Use as an improvement on SWFObject.