Animations with Flash

 

The motion aspects are an absolute marvel. You can adjust the frame rate to achieve the level of smoothness you want. Although the standard frame rate in Flash is 12 frames per second (fps), it can easily be set to 24 fps (as with film) or even 30 fps (as with television). In many cases the cost is very little more. Motion: frame rate, tweening, keyframes. Here are three examples of our colored button that play at 8, 16, and 24 fps. The total number of frames has been adjusted so that the total running time is about 3 seconds. You will notice a considerable difference in smoothness of the animation at the higher frame rate. However, please notice also that the file size is not significantly different. In fact the examples below are Flash-within-Flash animations. The button itself is a Flash animation, while the motion is another Flash animation. Flash has the added feature of code-reuse. The same animation can be used over-and-over again.

Frame rate
File size
Flash animation
8 fps
1.9kb
16 fps
2.1kb
24 pfs
2.4kb

 

 

More Flash animations

We finish this discussion with several different types of Flash animations.

 

Conversion.


Animated GIFs can be converted directly to Flash movies. Just import and save. Here is the rotating paraboloid example we considered in the Maple chapter . The size is much smaller, 154kb vs 373kb. It is very easy to alter timing of the images. In this example we paused the rotation for one second and then repeated the motion.

Flash permits many types of conversion.

 

 

Riemann sums (3)

This simple Flash animations shows the rectangles of the Riemann sum "falling" into place.
   
This animation shows the Riemann rectangles change with the change of the multiple of the function. It also shows how various controls can be integrated with Flash, giving th euser a little more involvment.
   
This example show Riemann sums evolving in a different way, one rectangle at a time with the hight puctuated by a dot.

 

 

Tangent line

This tangent line animation is similar to the animated GIF image you saw earlier.

This example uses a motion guide which the dot follows. It serves to enhance the convergence aspect.

 
   

 

 

 

 

Slide show

Here is an instructional tool. We orginally made this using JavaScript - as you will see later. But making these with Flash is much, much faster.
   

Here is another slide show type Flash animation. This one shows how parts of a solution can be given out frame by frame, or portion by portion, for ease of student comprehension.

 

 

 

   
Here's another similar but simpler example. In this example we input the text after the action.

 

 

Marquee

The marque you see to the right is a "poor man's" marquee made with two instances of moving text, the simplest to make of the Flash animations.



Here is a tutorial on how to make it.

Here is the Flash source file.

Doing math with Flash. This example is a prototype that uses Flash-JavaScript communication to compute virtually any programmable function and sum it at the integers over a given range. Sorry, there is no error trapping in this example. Also, the variable in the function must be x.

Direction: Input the function (in standard fortran-esque format) and the limits of summation. Source

This example requires the use of a mathematics parser to convert many common-form math expressions to the JavaScript acceptable format. Therefore, you will need to link to the example.

 

We've included a sound on the compute button. This sound was made by recording a genuine Enigma encryption machine.

Click here to use the parser

Screen shot

 

Next batch of Flash demonstrations.