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FlamingoRich — Flash Tutorial: Basic Symbol Animation
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Published: 2012-09-30 08:52:36 +0000 UTC; Views: 35450; Favourites: 643; Downloads: 510
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Description
Howdy everypony!
This is one of the tests I force every single one of the character animators interested in helping out with Double Rainboom to complete before I allow them on the crew . It's an incredibly convenient and easy way to learn how to animate using symbols in Adobe Flash.
So I thought I'd go ahead and post it for you all to enjoy!
To watch me demonstrate this demo in front of a live audience, then check out my YouTube video here ► [link]
You can download the .FLA in CS4.0 format via the links below:
Adobe Flash Files ► [link]
And I'm always looking for ways to improve the demo - so if any of you Flash-savvy animators have any ideas, then go ahead and post them in the comments below.
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Comments: 68
[link]
199 bucks for students.
Of course, there's always the Bittorrent "five finger discount", but bronies don't do that, do we?
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It took me some time to figure out what you meant by 'Select the first keyframe, then in Properties Panel > Looping set the First: number to "2".' (and so on)
Maybe it's just like that in CS5 but I had to select the symbol to get that setting. The keyframe itself doesn't have a Looping section in its properties. (Also I can set it to loop, play once or single picture - these options can be called differently since I translated it from my german version to english for now.)
Some more things I'd like to know:
Does your XSHEET layer have any other purpose than marking some special frames for you?
You use these symbols as grafics and therefore have to choose the keyframe shown in animations. Why don't you use movie clips? They automatically play. (I'm quite new to Flash, so I don't really know pros and cons for using the one or the other.)
Thanks for that tutorial anyway.
PS Maybe you should use a bigger font for your instructions... it's a bit tiny.
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Gah! You're absolutely right! I should have inserted "...now select the smiley symbol on the stage..." in between there. 
And the XSHEET is only there to mark frames and keep things organized.
We use graphics because they offer more control (we don't want the symbols to automatically play). But the main reason behind using graphics instead of movie clips is normally you don't export a final animation from Flash for posting on the web. It's better to export it out as a .SWF and then import that into After Effects. Then, from After Effects, you would place your sound files, other shots, intro/outro, and then render it out as a .MOV or a .AVI or a .H264. The problem with this method is that After Effects does NOT recognize movie clips from Flash - it won't load anything nested inside of them. So instead of a beautiful animation - you are stuck with a still image.
And yeah - the font is kind of tiny (but there was a lot of information to put in there).
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I need to get my flash updated =/ All I got is CS3 on my home computer and that's... just not good in the long run
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very nice! 
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Well, there is AS3 now, so maybe you should start learning it instead of old AS2/AS1. I, personally, dont like AS3 because its syntax is no longer so similar to JS/PHP/C and other nice languages.
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pls. don`t tell me the higher the version, the more complicated the codes will be 
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AS2 is a good language but it got replaced with AS3 which is, IMHO, too object-oriented. But it is the new version, so to be a professional in Flash programmer, you should start learning it instead of obsolete AS2/AS1. Most of the modern Flash apps are written in AS3.
If you did not do any programming before, then AS2 is a good thing to start from. In this case, there should be many AS2 tutorials in the internet (try to google them) because AS2 is pretty old.
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my head`s already busted w/ acquiring new skills, don`t know if I can absorb AS 3 by trying to forget AS 2
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Nopers
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