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INTERACTIVE WEB DEVELOPMENT
The upgrade makes strides in video, compositing, filters, and performance
Macromedia Studio 8 ships with Flash 8 (for interactive Web applications and animation), Dreamweaver 8 (HTML Web development), Fireworks 8 (Web-focused image editing), Contribute 3 (Web content editing for endusers) , and FlashPaper 2 (PDF creation). The Flash authoring tool is the flagship product, but Dreamweaver also leads its market.
Two versions of Flash 8 exist: Basic and Professional. The most exciting new features-such as the ability to recognize the alpha (transparency) channel in dynamically loaded bitmaps (such as PNG and TARGA files) and in video clips-are limited to Professional. Flash previously only supported alpha channels in bitmaps embedded in the SWF file.
Flash's dynamic loading results in smaller Flash files. For example, I wanted an animated penguin created in Autodesk Media and Entertainment's 3ds Max to waddle along the top of text created in Flash. For comparison, I created two Flash projects, both with alpha. In one, the animation was a series of PNG files. In the other, it was a QuickTime file. The PNGs gave me a 344KB SWF (penguin and text). The Flash video import wizard-a nice new Flash Pro 8 feature-converted...