Last summer, with my new digital camcorder in hand and the much touted feature of the then new Flash Mx to easily incorporate video, I was eager to get my hands on a how to book. I was happy to avoid the usual tedium of having to sort through 10 or so books on the topic. Friends of Ed had the only offering dedicated to video in FlashMx and that suited me just fine as I have always appreciated their books. That was the easy part!

Given that I consider myself a Flash fledgling rather than a Flash master this book was almost perfect. It is written simply enough that even I could understand it!

The book does a walk through of the basics of bringing video into Flash, beginning with how to capture and edit video. The video editing chapter perhaps exceeds the bounds of a how to for dummies. Step one of the section on video capture advises turning your camera on and putting a tape in!

The next chapter expands on a tutorial available on the Macromedia site on embedding video into Flash. It is mainly a guide to using Sorenson Squeeze. One of the more interesting features of Squeeze is its ability to stitch videos but the book does get into that at all. Probably to Wildform’s disappointment, it is remiss in not even mentioning Flix as a Squeeze alternative.

With the next few chapters you get an opportunity to explore how to work with video in Flash and add effects. The latter was interesting and fun but not extensive. Similarly, the chapters on sound and the sound object were very basic. I prefer the tutorial by Kenny Bellew, available on his website and on Flashkit for an extensive and in depth treatment of sound in MX.

The remainder of the book is devoted to a case study that leads to the development of a sophisticated sound/video player. I developed 3 versions of this wonderful player geared to different internet connections with four short videos and 3 music compositions. I was ready to impress the world with my new found skills. That was before I ran the bandwidth profiler: two measly frames and 8685 KB. Just 261.6 sec required for a preload! I don’t think so. The book failed to mention this detail.

It is unreasonable to expect a book to cover all things for all people. As a basic introduction to the use of video in Flash Mx this one does an excellent job in a clear, concise and fun fashion. As I have found with other Friends books, the support through the online forums is awesome. I even had a unique sound problem and was put into direct communication with one of the authors. Gotta like that!

Ellen Lazare is a multimedia designer in the Comox Valley on beautiful Vancouver Island. The videos are on her site are all in Quick time!