Sound Track or Sound Events?

[Flashinator 300]

Hello everyone,

I'm fairly new to making Flash "movies" and was wanting some advice. In particular, I'm wondering which is better:
1. Creating a Sound Layer and placing all sounds in it.
2. Adding all sound to keyframes only.
3. A combination between the first two.

I've been looking at Flash files as examples, and have notice that placing sound in Flash movies isn't done a set way. Of course, traditional media has employed the use of audio tracks that are seperate from video. The advantages are that the track is easy to locate, edit, excetera. The disadvantages are, of course, if you want to change something in the audio track, you have to edit the whole audio track AND that if the track is shortened/lengthened, you must now account for this in the video portion of the stream.

Now, Flash does this different as you can edit the instances of each audio sample inside a "global" sound layer (assuming of course that the track hasn't been combined into one linear track). This is highly advantageous compared to the single track version that comes on everything from film to DVD as you are only editing grouped samples and not the whole track.

So I guess I'm wondering if there is a need or benefit from taking this one step further and placing all sounds as events to keyframes. The disadvantages are:
1. Sound tracks will be more difficult to locate if "buried" in keyframes in the timeline.
2. ???

I'm also not sure what advantages this compositional approach will offer either. Sure, it would be "neat" to see the voice audio for a character linked at the character's mouth layer, but perhaps there are some other disadvantages to this approach.

Just wondering,
Pabl

[mark_my_words]

Its really more of what you like, or used to. Between those 3 choices, there are no wrong ways, in fact, ive done all those in one movie. I would recommend setting each sound to its own layer, especially if you plan on syncing the sound with the movie.

Adding a sound to a keyframe would be, like you mentioned, "buried" and would be much harder to find it.

as for creating a sound layer and placing all sounds in it (1.), its not recommended if you have a lot of sounds.

You kind of lost me on the "global" sound layer part...


-Mark

[Flashinator 300]

ha ha, just kidding with the title!

By "global" layer, I'm talking like the equivalent of an Action Layer, i.e., the Sound Layer.

Perhaps a better use of layers, in regards to sound management in Flash would be to have them labeled and catagorized relevent to something, such as Background Music Layer, Martha Sue's Voice Layer, Other Voices Layer, excetera.

In regards to attaching sound clips to individual keyframes, I've thought of another reason not to do it. Audio/Video processing boils down to audio (sound card) and video (video card) processing, in terms of data type through the computer (some bits going this way, some bits going that way). Keeping these as seperate as possible in the data file (SWF) seems like a good idea.