Lesson7.Adding Sound and Video

Lesson 7. Adding Sound and Video

Once upon a time, sound was the sole citizen of the realm of CD-ROM. It was very lonely there, so it went abroad and soon found its way to the World Wide Web, where it promptly gummed up the works by being too big and making download times way too long. In an effort to make everyone happy, it changed its nature, became MIDI-formatted, and MP3-formatted, and stopped being annoying background music because now it was so much better to use, and instead started being used for feedback, learning, and enhancement. And the web was a happier place.

Video and sound make the Tech Bookstore website more engaging

Then came the much, much larger cousin of sound, which you all know as video. Video was big (and we're not talking popularity here, friends, we're talking bandwidth). Video was picky, too, because some video only worked with QuickTime, and other video only with Windows Media Player, and still others only with RealPlayer. For a web designer, video was a VNI (very neat idea) that just wasn't practical to implement unless there was a SGR (Super Good Reason). Now, however, that is no longer true.

All the time video and sound were busy trying to make footholds in the web, a tool called Macromedia Flash Player was very quietly finding its way to average home users. The Flash Player at first wasn't able to accommodate sound and video, but eventually, the genies at Macromedia waved their development wands and before you know it, Flash Player (now on nearly every computer in the world) could not only animate but also could handle sound in several sophisticated ways. What's more, it suddenly was able to handle video, too. And the web became a happier place all over again.

In this lesson, you will work with sound and video, covering only the most commonly used features for Macromedia Flash 8 Basic. You'll import sound and change its properties. to control how nice it sounds. You'll also import video to play in your document Timeline. Because you haven't got a magical development wand, you'll have to do customization of your sound and video the old-fashioned way, which is manually. You will also learn the do's and don'ts of sound and video because when it comes to using these two cousins, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.