The Two Flavors of Flash 8

Flash 8 comes in two flavors: Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8 (Figure I-3). Aimed at the corporate team developer, Flash Professional 8 offers everything Flash Basic 8 does, plus :

• Additional graphic effects . With Flash Professional 8, you get convenient extras like filters (predefined blurs, glows , and drop shadows), blend modes (transparency effects that make compositing , or combining images, easy), and custom easing (the ability to slow down or speed up animated tweens with the click of a button).

• Support for mobile authoring . Flash Professional 8 comes with mobile templates (to help you size your animations for handhelds), an emulator (to let you see how your animations will appear on every handheld that Flash supports), and built-in publishing options.

• Support for high-end video manipulation . You can embed video clips into your Flash animations using both Flash 8 and Flash 8 Professional (as you see in Chapter 8). But Flash Professional 8 gives you extra tools, including the Flash Video Exporter (a QuickTime plug-in that lets you create Flash video files using any Apple QuickTimecompatible video authoring tool) and the Flash Video Encoder (a standalone application that lets you convert regular video files to Flash video files). Using Flash Professional 8, you can link to external video files and even layer video clips on top of each other to create sophisticated composite effects.

Figure I-3. The Flash Basic 8 interface looks pretty similar to the Flash Professional 8 interface, shown here, except for the product description in the title bar. The big difference comes when you're using Flash Basic and trying to use a feature that exists only in Flash Professional 8, such as adding a filter effect (for example, a drop-down shadow) to a block of text. In this book, features that appear only in Flash Professional are so noted, so you won't waste time hunting for them if you're running Flash Basic.