Its very rarely I do any animations and especially animations that need to sync with a sound. The other day I had a small job that required this.

I set my framerate and then import sound onto the timeline and set it’s Sync property to ‘Stream’. Once the animation was complete and I tested the movie the sound quality was absolutely aweful. It just wasn’t useable at all. The problem here was that is was just a voice over. The rest of the voices overs have been added directly to a director file and they are crystal clear, so I couldn’t just have a major drop in quality on this small flash animation. I tried lots of different compression settings but none of them produced a sound that was usable (i presume if your sound is music, then the quality difference wouldn’t be so noticable).
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Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move!

Late yesterday i got a review copy of the first 4 chapters for this book and it looks absolutley fantastic. Honestly you really oughta look into pre-ordering this book if you deal with Flash and scripted motion, or you want to progress from timeline animation to scripted animation.

My main interest is in interaction and animation and his book looks like its gonna cover everything you would need to know and thats includes Flash 8 stuff! This is now Keith’s nineth book and it seems to me hes become a seasoned writer. As soon as i started reading this book cheered me up. He has a knack of writing serious content in a light hearted way.

The contents is massive and it doesn’t leave anyone out. I know the title says ‘Foundation’, and although this book does cover foundation stuff it goes on to cover all areas of scripted animation in depth. It starts by covering the concepts of animation and how the term animation is defined.

It then goes on to show you the various ways you can achieve animation in Flash, with quick examples you can test. This covers frame passed, loop based and event based animation.

The comes the dreaded trigonometry. There are some great examples in here and tips for using trig in Flash. Each is worked through and explained throughly with important stuff you should remember really shoved in your face. The chapter ends in showing you how to achieve various paths of animation using trigonometry.

So after you know about animation, how to achieve it, and how to define the path you want you properties to animate on what do you need to know next. Oh yeah how to render the anaimations on screen. This chapter covers the drawing API, filters, matrix’s, hexidecimal color values etc… etc…

Stuff to come in later chapters?
Velocity, boundaries user interaction, easing, collision, attraction, kinematics, 3D and a whole chapter dedicated tips and tricks.

I highly recommend you go order this book. I’d like to hear from anyway who says it isn’t invaluable!