Using
Bitmaps in Flash
Required Materials: Adobe Photoshop 5.5 or later, Macromedia
Flash 4 or later.
We all like animutation music videos, and one of the hallmark
characteristics of these funny pieces of work is the use of celebrity
portraits attached to animated bodies. Many times, however, the
raster images, or bitmaps, being used in these videos have not
been edited properly for use in Flash. This can have a very nasty
effect on the visual quality of the animation and
detract from its entertainment value.
Bitmaps are painted images that are encoded pixel-for-pixel with
binary color values. Flash, despite its ability to import bitmaps,
was not designed for animating this type of data. The drawing
tools in Flash are vector drawing tools, intended for creating
stroke paths and fill paths. The purpose of this tutorial is not
to explain the differences between vector graphics and bitmaps,
but it should suffice to say that they are two completely different
types of data.
With that said, there is a very effective way to edit bitmaps
so that they fit nicely into any Flash animation. It all starts
with the most ubiquitous graphics editing program to ever exist
- good old Adobe Photoshop.
For a bitmap to blend well into a Flash movie, it must have organic
edges and a transparent background. Hence, what we need is a bitmap
format which recognizes zero-alpha (transparent) pixels, and is
handled in the same way by both Photoshop and Flash. So, who's
our Huckleberry? It's the PNG format.
1. In Photoshop, open your iconic photograph of Colin Mochrie,
or whichever celebrity is going to be fighting aliens in your
video. Duplicate the photograph onto a second layer by clicking
Layer > Duplicate Layer, and give it the name photo, or whatever
name you wish.
(Click Image to Enlarge)
