How to put together several Flash scenes

Zeb · Post by **Zeb** » Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:55 pm

I am working on making an animation to go along with a 3 minute song. I want to do the various scenes as individual Moho files and export them to Flash. How would I put them all together into a single Flash file? What would be the best software for this?

cribble · Post by **cribble** » Sun Apr 23, 2006 4:26 pm

There's quite a few programs that'll let you do that.

The uber popular, Macromedia Flash series will let you import mutliple flash files, cut, split, paste them together and export it, with sound as a final flash file. You can also try and export to video, it'll take a while though. This is a great bit of software which everyone recommends... industry speaking.

You can pick up Flash MX or MX2004 very cheap on ebay now... so get it oonn.

There's other software like Swish, koolmoves and there's one more which i've forgotten the name of, which are all dirt cheap to buy, but lack the some of the facilities of Macromedia's software. But are capable of doing what you want to do... but if you want to expand on future projects, you'll end up upgrading... which equals a bigger hole in the wallet.

Zeb · Post by **Zeb** » Sun Apr 23, 2006 7:56 pm

Thanks, Cribble! I have SwishMax, what are the settings I need to select to import each SWF file? I've tried and couple of things and it just crashed SM.

myles · Post by **myles** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 12:02 am

SWFCombine from SWF Tools (freeware, command-line) will also do this, if you don't mind working at the command-line.

See:
http://www.swftools.org/swfcombine.html
http://www.swftools.org/

Regards, Myles.

Zeb · Post by **Zeb** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 12:23 am

Thanks, Myles! I'll give it a try. How does it handle the soundtrack? Since I am using the audio track of a song, I guess I would split it up for each segment. On the final composite file, can I add the complete audio so there are no skips or gaps?

myles · Post by **myles** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 6:21 am

Zeb,

No, I don't think it allows adding in a separate soundtrack.

As I understand it, it basically just adds in the the SWFs as movie clips, then plays one after the other. Limited but potentially useful for adding Moho SWF shots together.

Maybe you can do something similar (movie clips) with SwishMax rather than importing them directly, but add the sound in separately.

Personally, I don't trust SWF to keep the sound in synch when using a single soundtrack, although that may have changed in later versions of Flash.

Regards, Myles.

myles · Post by **myles** » Tue May 02, 2006 4:03 am

Okay, SWFcombine will add a soundtrack, if you convert it to swf format. Wav2swf is one of the other SWF Tools set.

Whether it can add several visual SWFs sequentially and then add a soundtrack to the combined files, I don't know.

I'm still pessimistic about synchronisation issues. but if I get time I'll play with .swf files tonight.

Regards, Myles.

Zeb · Post by **Zeb** » Tue May 02, 2006 5:46 am

Thanks for all your trouble, Myles! You really are a source of info and help! I tried out Flash and it works quite well without having to fiddle a whole lot. I had tried SwishMax and it choked on my tiny SWF files. But Macromedia, or should I say, Adobe Macromedia Flash worked fine.