Adding Video and Sound - Importing and Setting Sounds
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You can best optimize your files if you take care of their file size settings before importing them into Flash. Flash has a limited number of sound settings, and although some of the settings are key ones, you're better off optimizing sound in your sound editor.
Importing sound is quite easy. Select File, Import to Library from the main menu. (If you select Import to Stage, the sound will be imported to the library. You can use the Ctrl+R shortcut to import to the Stage, and it will work just like selecting a file for library import.) When you're importing multiple sound files, importing them to the library first helps to organize them. Once the files are in the library, you can then select the layer and/or keyframe where you want the sound to begin. Select the sound file you want, and the file is imported.
If you want to use sound from an AVI file, the process is very similar, but you need an additional step to separate the sound file from the video. Use the following steps:
Select File, Import to Library and select an AVI file to import. The Video Import Wizard opens.
Select the Import the Entire Video option and then click the Next button. If you want to edit the video file first, select the Edit the Video option, and you can choose only the portion needed for the sound.
In the Editing Encoding window, select any speed you want in the Compression Profile drop-down menu. The compression profile size at this stage is not important because you will be deleting the video portion of the file, changing the audio portion to MP3, and then setting the bit rate and sound quality in Flash.
In the Advanced Settings pop-up menu, select Create New Profile. The Encoding (Advanced Settings) window opens. In the lower-left corner under Track Options, select Separate from the Audio Track drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 10.1.
Once you've made all these settings, click Finish. In the Library panel, you should see two files: the video file and the audio file from the same original AVI file. A speaker icon identifies the sound file, and a video camera icon identifies the video file. Figure 10.2 shows separate audio and video files from an AVI file with the name narration.avi.
After the import of sound from an AVI file is complete, delete the video portion from the Library panel if all you need is the sound portion. In other applications, you may need to throw out the separated sound portion and rerecord the sound or not use it at all.
Figure 10.1
Separating the audio and video tracks.
Figure 10.2
Sound from an AVI file in a Flash movie.
 This chapter is from Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004, by Bill Sanders (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 0672326051). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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