Flash & Photoshop

Question

I am about to work on a short animation with a designer, who
is an expert on Photoshop. Both of us are new to Flash, and this is
my first real project since I started to learn Flash. Almost all
the examples I have learned from the book, these images were either
created in Flash or have been converted into symbols. Here are my
questions:
1) If the designer insistes on doing all his design (graphic)
in Photoshop, what does he need to pay attention?
2) If we want to make a small animation like a person
walking, does he have to save all the parts (like arms, legs, face,
etc.) into different images and I assemble them all in Flash? Is
there any better way?
3) What file would be better? jpg? png? gif? or all the same?
4) Will this effect the file size?
Thank you very much... any reply would be
appreciated....

Answer 1

Hi,
Regarding your points, here are some ideas things come to my
head;
1) If the designer insistes on doing all his design (graphic)
in Photoshop, what does he need to pay attention?
Answer:
1- Make sure that you do not resize the image files in Flash,
use the exact image size and if you like to resize an image, do it
in Photoshop, otherwise , this may cause image distortion.
2- For solid colors, gradient, text...etc. or thing that you
can do in Flash, you can discard it form the Photoshop file and
redo it in Flash to be easy-to-edit and less in size in most cases.
3- Try to crop the unused spaces around the images.
2) If we want to make a small animation like a person
walking, does he have to save all the parts (like arms, legs, face,
etc.) into different images and I assemble them all in Flash? Is
there any better way?
Answer:
I myself do not prefer using images in animated characters,
as animating the body parts will look distorted, you need to got
the character as vector, either getting it from the vector program
or if your image is sharp enough to allow you to trace it in Flash
to convert it to vector.
But as a general concept, dividing the animated character as
parts will help animating the character more easier. The link
Keer8R provided is one of the best animation learining links, and
also, here is a link for a great animator and I am sure you will
learn alot of him (by the way he is a regular contributer in this
forum, hope he sees you post ;)):
http://www.keyframer.com/
http://www.keyframer.com/
3) What file would be better? jpg? png? gif? or all the same?
Answer:
I used to use JPG for images without transperancy and PNG for
transpernt images, but if you have Flash CS3, you will have to
worry about that, as you can import the PSD file unsing the PSD
import feature, which allows you to see the PSD files and select
what to import and what to discrad, get the transpert the layer
with reserving its transperancy, arrange the layers as frames or
layer and alot more..
If you are worry about the size you can set the quality of
the imported images from library by right-click the images and
select properties. you can either make the image take to same
quality in the publish setting by choosing (Use Document Default
Quality), or set an individual setting for each image by unchecking
this option and set the image quality as you like. the less the
quality is the less the SWF file becomes.
4) Will this effect the file size?
answer:
I guess I answered this question within the previous answers
Hope this helps