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[Adobe TV Presents...] [Paul Trani in...] [Adobe Flash Professional CS5, Training with Trani] So with Flash CS5, it's actually never been easier to get into Flash, and it really makes development quick. So aside from the code enhancements, the Code Snippets panel, there's some other things actually, they're called Templates, available in Flash. From this start-up menu, I can go ahead and access any of the templates right here in the upper left. So I can click more and access more, or I can go to "File" "New." Notice how I have this Templates button right here. Okay, so with Flash CS4, in previous versions there were a certain amount of templates in there, which were kind of helpful, but, again, it's getting even more robust now. So under advertising, you can obviously see that there's these various templates. And what these are, are just basically files kind of built and set up for certain types of banners, which is really useful. I can jump down to animation, and this is what I mean when I say it's helpful if you are interested in learning more about Flash, you can actually pick apart these files. So there's even some sort of random movement files. I'm just going to go ahead and select this "Scripted Rain," just as an example, click "Okay." So it doesn't look like much, but as I scroll down here, it does tell me sort of what's going on with this file. So it says I can go ahead and modify the rain appearance, just by double-clicking on this guy and editing this sort of tween that's going on here. Click back on scene one. And I can even open up the actions panel and examine the code there, as well. So I'm going to go to "Window Actions." I can go ahead and see that these are the number of symbols, the number of raindrops that it's adding. Again, it's a pretty rainy day, but if you want it to be sort of a lighter day, obviously, I can change that to something less if I want to. But again, we'll just actually up this to about 200. And I'm going to go ahead and do a Control Test Movie, and let's just see what this rain looks like first off. See the rain kind of falling there? Kind of falling at an angle, some of it's turning. But you can see what that does. The point is, is that I can go ahead and take this file; I can modify the graphics and the code and sort of make it my own. Maybe it's not even a rain at the end of the day, but it's just something that moves from one position to another position randomly. Okay, so I'm just going to close that file. I'm not going to save it. And again, I'm going to go ahead and access the template files by clicking more right here. It takes me back to that same location, and I can start to explore more of these. So again, under Banners is obviously banners. This is actually going to have some custom code in here, as well, with a button, in this case. But I actually want to show you Media Playback. This is really cool because I can go ahead and sort of create a file based on HDTV settings. So I can actually sort of make animation in Flash and deploy that for broadcast television if I want to. But I'm going to select this top one here because I think this is going to be really helpful to you. The Advance Photo Album, and notice that it's driven by XML and Action Script. I'll click "Okay," and, again, it's the same process. Scroll down, read about it, and then start to customize it. As I go ahead and look at my actions panel for that layer, here is my XML, and it's defining these images. So in some cases, these templates might not work as expected because you've got to be aware of what's going on. In this case, I have to have an image in this location. So not only that, this shows me some different transition types I can use. It's going to do a simple fade, so it's just going to kind of fade in, but I can also do many other different transitions. But be aware of what's going on behind the scenes. And in this case, I need to make sure there's images in the right place, so I'll just save out this file. I'll do a "Save As," and I'll save it to my desktop, because notice that on my desktop, I have all of these images. So I'm going to call this "My Image Viewer," save, and now it's go ahead and recognize those files in that location. I'll go to "Control," "Test Movie," and test it out. So there we are. It's pulling from those images. It automatically plays through, it looks like, four images total, and it will cycle through them. So again, I didn't really have to write any code at all. It's all baked in here. And then it's just a matter of modifying this. I've noticed how I can click through using these buttons, or I can click the thumbnails off to the side. I just love this ability. And again, the last thing I'm going to do is go to "File" "New" and show you that there are also some presentations that are kind of built the same way. I'm not going to open up this, but you can basically, instead of using Power Point, you can even use Flash and really make a dynamic presentation all from selecting that appropriate file. So I encourage you to explore all of these, and notice there is even sample files in here. I'm not going to go over all of them, but, at the very least, this is a great way to learn how to do a drag and drop, for instance. But really your goal is to decide what you want to do and see if there's a template file that matches up what you want to do. In my specific case, I was really looking at making some sort of portfolio items, so I'm going to go to "File" "Open" and from the desktop, I can go ahead and open up this Flash file. And again, you can see that this is based on that template file I just reviewed. I have swapped out the buttons, I've modified the background, so really it's your chance to make it your own. So I'll just test this. And there we are. We can see that I've actually modified the transitions choosing a random so each transition, from one image to the next, is something different. You can see those sort of swooshes going on in the background. That's actually the rain that I modified. So again, I've taken a template file, modified it, called it my own, and still the functionality is there and available to me. So as you've noticed, it's actually been really easy to take a template file, modify it, and really call it your own for whatever job you're looking at completing. But that's Templates. Really easy to use. So have fun with them. [Executive Producer, Bob Donlon; Producer, Karl Miller] [Director/VFX, Kush Amerasinghe; DP/Post Production, Erik Espera] Adobe TV Productions, tv.adobe.com]
