Flash is one of the most engaging, innovative, and versatile technologies available -- allowing the creation of anything from animated banners and simple cartoons to rich Internet applications, interactive videos, and dynamic user interfaces for web sites, kiosks, devices, or DVDs. The possibilities are endless, and now it just got better. Flash CS5 boasts a host of new features, including better support for mobile devices, a whole new animation engine enabling full manipulation of tweens and paths, custom easing, improved inverse kinematics, a revamped timeline, built-in 3D, and much more. This book is all you'll need to learn Flash CS5 from the ground up. If you already have Flash experience, this book will allow you to quickly catch up on all the cool new features. Flash experts Tom Green and Tiago Dias guide you step-by-step through all facets of Flash CS5, keeping the emphasis firmly on good design techniques that you use in your own projects. * Learn Flash design from the ground up, or just get to grips with the new features, with a series of step-by-step tutorials. * Provides an easy introduction to ActionScript 3.0 coding, but the focus is mainly kept on design. * Learn from the experts -- written by renowned Flash designers Tom Green and Tiago Dias.

As a Flash 8 designer, you have discovered the power of the video tools in the application. The new filters and effects and ActionScript classes allow you to create a variety of stunning visual effects in Flash. What you probably havent discovered is how easy it is empower your video hundreds of times more by combining the many effects and tools in After Effects 7 Professional with Flash!

This book, the first to explore the potential power and creativity boost that can be unleashed when After Effects and Flash are used together, is designed to get you up to speed with working in these two applications while hitting you with some creative innovation. You will discover how effectively you can use After Effects to create video and animation effects that were either extremely difficult or impossible to achieve in Flash.

By the end of this book, you will have created a variety of projects ranging from text effects, masks, and alpha channel video to 3D effects and audio visualization. All are designed to show you the potential available to you with these two powerhouse applications, and, more importantly, to expand the arsenal of creative motion graphics tools at your disposal. Summary of contents: Chapter 1: From Concept to Final Product in After Effects Chapter 2: From Final Product to Upload in Flash Professional 8 Chapter 3: Motion Graphics and the Preset Text Effects Chapter 4: Creating Alpha Channel Video for Flash Chapter 5: Creating Text Animations for Flash Chapter 6: Creating Special Effects Chapter 7: Playing with Text Chapter 8: Meet the Parents Chapter 9: The Video Behind the Mask Chapter 10: Track Mattes Are Your Friend Chapter 11: Adding a Third Dimension Chapter 12: Audio, the Red-Headed Kid in a Family of Blondes