[bitmaps, masks, reverse, motion guides]

This week we worked with masks, reverse frames, motion guides, importing images, using dingbats and the trace bitmap function.  The attached movie includes examples of each of these exercises.

Lesson one .fla is here

And this is the .swf below.  I wanted to add sound, but it's still a *no-no* in class right now so use your imagination to supply the racket...lol 

If you want to replay, just hit the reload/refresh button on your browser to reload the page.

I found in working with motion guides the same kind of problem that we ran into with shape hints.  Snapping the appropriate spots does not seem to be very intuitive or easy to spot in quite a few images.  It's really rather a fiddle and guess  sort of process.  I don't know if that could be tightened up in the program to make it a bit more user friendly, but it would be nice.

A nice treat I discovered with MX and my new system was that trace bitmap is much more functional for me than it was with Flash5 and my older computer.  There it would freeze and/or crash Flash about eight out of ten times and the few times it did work, I had to walk away and do something else then come back.  It was extremely slow.  What a treat to have it work in an instant!  I do not know if they changed any functionality in the program itself or if it's just my newer system, but the change is so marked, that I have a feeling it is a bit of both.  Whatever it might be, I am now one happy camper!