Creating SWF Animations in ImageReady

New	A SWF (pronounced ˜Swiff ) animation is often called a Flash animation, because the SWF file format originated with Macromedia s Flash software. But, with version CS, ImageReady can create SWF animations, too.

Creating a SWF animation is similar to creating a GIF animation. In fact, in most cases, both the process and the results are virtually identical. SWF export is primarily useful if you are creating new elements for Flash-based websites . SWF files can be loaded dynamically by other SWF files. SWF files can also contain dynamic text, which can be changed via HTML, Flash ActionScripting, JavaScript, and PHP.

If the animation consists largely of vector shapes and text, SWF files are often more efficient than GIFs. Experiment and see what looks best, and weighs in with the lowest byte count.

In this section, you ll create a SWF animation and then take a closer look at some of the options used to do so.

Creating the Animation

To create a SWF animation, do the following:

Open the beating heart animation you saved in the preceding exercise, or open the Beating_Heart_Animation.gif file from ch26 folder on the CD.
Select all the frames by choosing Select All Frames from the Animation palette menu. Click one of the arrows which appear at the lower-right of each frame, and set a delay of 0.1 seconds.
Choose File ’ Export ’ Macromedia Flash SWF.
Make sure Generate HTML is selected. Your settings should look like Figure 26.8.

Figure 26.8: The SWF export dialog box in ImageReady
Ignore the rest of the options for now, and click OK to save the file.
Save the animation as Beating_Heart_Animation.swf . ImageReady creates an HTML file called Beating_Heart_Animation.html with the SWF animation in it.
Open the newly created HTML file and preview the animation. It looks just like your animated GIF. The difference is that it s all ready to drop into a Flash-centric website.

Understanding the SWF Export Dialog Box

ImageReady SWF export offers you several options:

Preserve Appearance If you check Preserve Appearance, ImageReady will rasterize and flatten some vector layers, preserving the appearance of the animation, including layer effects, at the cost of a slightly larger file. If you leave Preserve Appearance unchecked, any effects, such as Drop Shadow, are dropped from vector (for example, text) layers .

SWF Bgcolor Use this option to specify the background color for the SWF.

Generate HTML Check this to tell ImageReady to create an HTML Web page wrapper with the SWF file within it.

Enable Dynamic Text Check the Enable Dynamic Text option if you want your SWF files to contain dynamic variable text.

Embed Fonts If you enable dynamic text, you can choose whether to embed your font in the file. The dynamic text will be displayed in the embedded font. If no font is embedded, the text will be displayed using a default system font. You can choose to embed the entire font or, to save file space, only selected characters . Click the buttons beneath the Embed Fonts drop-down list to individually embed uppercase characters, lowercase characters, numbers , and punctuation. You can also type extra characters to be embedded in the file.

Bitmap Options The following options are available from the Format drop-down list:

Lossless-8 encodes your bitmaps as 8-bit GIFs.
Lossless-32 encodes your bitmaps as 32-bit PNGs.
JPEG encodes your bitmaps as 24-bit JPEGs.
Auto Select tells ImageReady to choose the format it thinks will provide the best compromise between quality and file size .

If you choose Auto Select or JPEG, you can manually set the JPEG quality.