Matching Location Strategy

[Binar]

Fellow Forum Members,

I'm trying to figure out a strategy that will let me work around the short comings of SWFx and I would appreciate any help.

What is the best approach to cut from a SWFx movie to a Flash SWF movie so that the content's location matches perfectly? Let me elaborate. I have the word "technology" with effect 287 applied. It only loads onto the Flash stage using the loadmovie command, and because of this I have nothing to reference to when I try to continue with some additional tweens (within FlashMX) applied to the same word "technology". In other words what is the best way to match the location of the word "technology" so that its ending point within the SWFx movie matches its beginning point within the FlashMX movie?

I have tinkered around trying to accomplish this by relying on the x and y position of the "+" curser viewable within SWFx, but it's location is difficult to duplicate within the Flash stage eventhough I'm using the same font, and font size for the word "technology" that I used within SWFx. Making everything still more difficult is that the fonts don't match as far as kerning is concerned.

In short, I'm finding it very difficult to pickup within FlashMx the ending point of the SWFx movie so that the word "technology" continues on with some additional tweens within FlashMX without an any noticable visual cues that I'm splicing two separate movies together.

Any tips will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Binar

[Edited by Binar on 05-05-2002 at 04:42 PM]

[patrickjv]

I have no direct solution but have some feedback.

Take a look at http://www.patrickjansen.net/swfx/s4
There you'll see the ultimate text is

the
"Supreme 4"
collection

The "Supreme 4" starts with a 'ray of light' effect and then takes a gradient... the 'ray of light' is the SWFX effect part, and the gradient is added in Flash itself.

Bottom-line; You'll need to use the same font size/type etc
in Flash to overlap/replace the effect.

When creating the movie, I got a bit tired of having to roll the complete timeline before seeing the result. That's where the 'trick' comes. I simply added a temporarily GoTo and Play e.g 357 to skip everything and immediately go to the frame which loads the effect. Then it's simply a matter of detecting the endframe of the effect using an extra temporary 1-frame keyframe (put a simple square in it) and finetuning/possitioning the flash-overlapping text to the correct position at that right keyframe and at the same keyframe delete the loaded swfx effect MC. A few pixels of difference in position won't make be notice by anyone

It's still manual.. Although you can easily get the coordinates of the loaded movie, I think it will be difficult to detect the exact position of the letter(s) since it wil change by font sizes

Besides this, you mentioned using simple tweens... well, you don't have to use flash-internal text to do that, on the wildform site you can download the smart load-movie fla/tutorila in which you simply add motion/alpha tweens etc on the whole movieclip (in which you loaded the effect) to e.g. fade or scale them out.

Hope it makes a bit sense and helped a bit
greetzzz,
PJ

[Jonathan_B]

You can load your SWFX SWF into an empty movie clip. The upper left hand corner of the loaded movie will line up with the center of the empty movie clip (the crosshairs). You can also change the position of the clip by setting the x and y coordinates with actionscript. Go to the Actions Panel and from "Actions" choose "setProperty". Go to the bottom of the Actions Panel and choose the _x property from the list, enter the target (make sure your target has an instance name), and enter the value (whatever you want your x position to be). Do the same for the _y property. This can be a frame action, button action, whatever.
jb