Chapter 14. Adding Sound and Video

It’s amazing how much a classic silent film conveys with just moving pictures and text, but that era is history. Audio is a vital feature of today’s Web sites. In Macromedia Flash, movies can incorporate sound, either as an ongoing background element or as a synchronized element that matches a particular piece of action—say, a slapping sound that accompanies a pair of hands clapping.

Adding yet another tool for bringing realism to your movies, Flash MX introduces the capability to embed video clips for playback directly in Flash Player. Sorenson Media’s Spark codec, which is built into Flash MX, handles the compression of video for import into Flash’s authoring environment and decompression of the video data during playback of the published movie. This system allows you to include short video clips in your Flash movies and still keep file sizes manageable. You also have the option of linking video clips to your movie during authoring and then exporting the movie to QuickTime, where all the Flash animation takes place on a separate track from the video.