Lesson 16. Sound and Video

Few things enhance the way we experience something more than sound does. Not only does sound provoke an almost instantaneous emotional response, it also provides dimension. When standing in the middle of a crowded room, you can close your eyes and easily determine the relative position of people and clattering items just by listening. In a Macromedia Flash presentation you can employ sound to provide your user with context as well as to create an engaging experience.

In addition to sound we'll work with video in this lesson. The Flash Player can load external files at runtime. This ability allows you to create some fun and interesting applications.

Flash's sound controls will make this basketball sound like the real thing.

In the coming exercises, we'll demonstrate Flash's versatile sound controls by emulating a bouncing basketball inside an arena. We'll also use a media component and cue points to build an application that loads and plays an external video.