Flash tutorials

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Introduction

EduTech Wiki contains a few introductory Flash and ActionScript tutorials for Flash version 9 (aka Flash CS3) and some Flash CS4 or CS5. I used them in my COAP 2110 (Fall 1 2007, Fall 2008, Spring 2010) and STIC III (Fall 2007, fall 2008) STIC IV (spring 2010, in french) courses. Some are better than others and none is top quality so far, but most can serve as lecture notes and for some self-study.

Most CS3 tutorials are also of interest to CS4/CS5 users. The interface did change, but since Adobe's terminology is stable, CS4 and CS5 users should have no problems learning from tutorials made for CS3. The difference between CS3 and CS4 isn't major, but there are some useful additions in CS4 like better motion tweening, inverse kinematics and support for 3D animation of 2D objects. CS5 is no different from CS4 as far as the user interface is concerned, but since it now supports code snippets it is better suited for teaching Flash to beginners.

Update: Since fall 2010, I barely did any updates for the reason that I no longer teach Flash in English. The french version, on the other hand, is more or less up-to-date. The Flash tutorials still can be useful. CS3 is not that different from CS5, e.g. both use Actionscript 3. Of course, any of these tutorials should be improved, but I got many things in the pipeline in which I am more interested - 12:15, 15 October 2011 (CEST)~

List of Flash CS3 Tutorials

Introduction

Setting up Flash and understanding the environment

  1. Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium installation
  2. Flash CS3 desktop tutorial
  3. Flash CS4 desktop tutorial
  4. Flash CS5 desktop tutorial (stub)
  5. Flash CS6 desktop tutorial

Basic drawing

  1. Flash drawing tutorial
  2. Flash layers tutorial

Basic animation

  1. Flash animation overview
  2. Flash frame-by-frame animation tutorial
  3. Flash classic motion tweening tutorial
  4. Flash CS4 motion tweening tutorial
  5. Flash shape tweening tutorial
  6. Flash animation summary

Use of external media

  1. Flash video component tutorial
  2. Flash sound tutorial
  3. Clipart and texture (to help you finding/importing media elements)

Advanced drawing

  1. Flash object transform tutorial
  2. Flash arranging objects tutorial
  3. Flash colors tutorial
  4. Flash bitmap tracing tutorial
  5. Flash pen tutorial

Basic interactivity and use of components

  1. Flash button tutorial
  2. Flash button tutorial - AS2 -- only for people who work with (old) Flash 8.
  3. Flash components overview (not complete)
  4. Flash component button tutorial
  5. Flash component button tutorial - AS2
  6. Flash video component tutorial
  7. Flash datagrid component tutorial
  8. Flash and php interaction tutorial (not started yet)
  9. Flash animation and interactivity example problems
  10. Flash actions-frame tutorial (CS5)

Medium animation

  1. Flash embedded movie clip tutorial
  2. Flash CS3 special effects tutorial
  3. Flash mask layers tutorial

Medium Interactivity

(some more ActionScript)

  1. Flash drag and drop tutorial
  2. ActionScript 3 event handling tutorial
  3. ActionScript 3 interactive objects tutorial (not finished)
  4. Flash CS4 motion tweening with AS3 tutorial
  5. Flash games tutorial (not really done, maybe sometimes in 2009))
  6. Flash for presentations tutorial (not done, stub)

Working with ActionScript libraries

  1. Flash using ActionScript libraries tutorial (under construction)
  2. AS3 TweenLite tweening engine (tutorial missing)
  3. Flash Papervision3D tutorial

List of Flash CS4 Tutorials

  1. Flash CS4 inverse kinematics tutorial
  2. Flash CS4 3D tools tutorial
  3. Flash CS4 motion tweening tutorial
  4. Flash CS4 motion tweening with AS3 tutorial

AS3 Class programming with CS5

...

Other Flash articles of interest

General
  1. Flash -- the entry page for most everything that is Flash
  2. Flash CS3 keyboard shortcuts
  3. Flash ActionScript 3 overview -- a conceptual little overview of AS3
  4. Flash formats and objects overview (not ActionScript objects !)
  5. Flash - being organized (some advice for beginning Flash CS3 designers)
  6. Flash 3D -- overview page of of Flash 3D tools and AS3 libraries
ActionScript and Flex tutorials
  1. ActionScript 3 tutorials -- a complete programming language. The entry page for "pure" AS3 tutorials
  2. Flex tutorials. Entry page for Flex tutorials.

Other resources

We maintain five pages that include external resources:

Media (pages that include links to repositories for media elements)