However, a fellow named Sham Bhangal wrote a little application using actionscript that allows us to have a virtual camera that can be animated within scenes.

There is also a fairly in-depth article (regarding v-Cam use and more so: the code) here. If you’re handy with actionscript and are looking for a little more detail on the vCam, you may prefer to start there.

But if you’d like a quick start with the vCam then download the this file and continue reading.

Set the vCam to Your Stage Size

1. Open vcam.fla that you downloaded from the link above.
2. Copy the vcam movieclip symbol and paste it into your movie on a new layer (this layer should always remain the first layer).


Note: All the code the vCam needs to function is within itself. Whenever the vCam is on the stage it takes affect, and when it’s removed flash will treat it like it was never there.

3. It’s important that you set the initial size of the vCam to the size your of your stage. Vote4Oz is a 640×480 movie so you’ll notice if you downloaded the file above that the vCam’s dimensions are 640×480. If this is not done, your movie may appear distorted when running through the vCam.
4. Panning: Apply a normal motion tween to the vCam. Whatever the vCam passes is over will be what’s shown on screen.

Note: You can move the vCam off the stage itself, and it will still work. Keep this is mind.

5. Zooming: Tween the vCam smaller to zoom in, larger to zoom out.

Sound Properties: Event and Stream

There are two main options for your sounds in flash: event and stream. If your sound isn’t syncing up, it’s likely that all you have to do is make sure your sounds are set to stream and not event. If a sound is set to stream flash prioritizes the sound and if you’re animation can’t keep up then frames will be dropped in order to keep sync.

Simple enough, right? I thought so too. Unfortunately, as our animations for Vote4Oz grew longer we found our sound losing sync anyway. Needless to say it was pretty devastating. After searching through many forums for the answer to our dilemma, I finally discovered the solution to what (as far as I know) is a bug in flash. Read on.

If you’re producing a lengthy animation, chances are you’re using the scenes feature in Flash. After about the 3rd scene you may notice some massive problems with sound synchronization (whether or not your sound properties are set to stream). The solution is to fool Flash by placing a layer known as the “Sound Kicker” in every scene.

1. Create a new layer and label it “SoundKicker”
2. On the 5th frame of this layer create a keyframe
3. Create, find, or download an audio file that contains about 1 second of silence
4. Import the sound into your library
5. With the 5th frame selected, attach the silent audio file and choose Stream and Loop from the Sync portion of the frames properties.

6. On the 6th frame of the “SoundKicker” layer create another blank keyframe

(you’re layer should look like this now)

The little gizmo will throw Flash into a constant loop of a streaming sound that no one will be able to hear. Now, instead of setting the rest of your sounds to Stream, set the to Event. Flash will still treat this Event sounds as streaming sounds, only the sync problems on and after the 3rd scene should be corrected. Make sure you do this for every scene and that all your sounds are now set to event. This problem occurred in Flash 8, and most likely in previous versions as well.