Flash Week | Day #2 – Flash Captions

06 A new Flash document

Open Flash CS4 and create a new ActionScript 3.0 Flash file. In the Properties panel click on the Edit button next to the size to change the dimensions to 720 pixels wide by 490 pixels high, then click OK. Open the components window and drag the “FLVPlaybackCaptioning” component to the stage.

07 Position the component

This component is invisible when published so it doesn’t really matter where we place this. However, so that we can get easy access to it later on position it just off the stage on the right. This component automatically connects itself to any video in any FLVplayback component on the stage.

08 Add the video

Go to the File menu and choose Import>Import video. The Import video window will pop up on your screen, click the Browse button and choose the file “caption_demo.mov”. Click Continue and you will be prompted for a skin, choose “skinUnderPlaySeekCaption.SWF” then click Continue again and this will import the video.

09 Position on the stage

With the video on the stage selected, change its position to 0 pixels in the x and y axis from the Properties panel. On the stage select caption component and in the component inspector change the source to “captions.xml”. Now save the Flash file in the same folder as mentioned in step one.

10 Publish the file

Press Ctrl+Return on the keyboard to test the SWF. You should see the captions being displayed at the bottom of the video while the video is playing. If you managed to get the timing right, it should be very successful. The only slight drawback is that the text is very small, so let’s change that.

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