Flash for film makers - Gripe

I have worked with Flash since 3/4 and by and large have found it one of those k.apps for building sites.

I know, I know, some of us can't get our heads around.

Wait ! I'm about to join you.

Flash, and you must have been living under the floor boards if you don't know this is an animation - design tool.

It can be used to quite frankly do some amazing things.

I have it them to make promos - which you can email to clients at a minuscule 200k as well as start to build sites such as this New Nation Rising.

CS3 - Flash now under adobe makes a radical departure for non Flash folks.

I don't doubt it will have raised the bar for Flash designers making their skill that little bit more invaluable,but if you're a non Flash user or film maker, get ready to do what Flash want you to do - spend some money on training.

The interface more or less looks the same as Flash 8, but some crucial easily employed functions have been deprecated.

"stop sounds" are now behaviours and loading movies takes a different route.

It's so less intuitive as I see it that it almost removes the ideal of teaching journalists.

Perhaps after a bout of training that may change, but that's not the point.

I imagine I'll arrive on campus to find CS3 installed.

My immediate thoughts at the moment will be to stick to CS2 (unless you've got some serious flash stuff to do), but deploy CS3's FLV encoder.

Stick to CS2 or below unless that is you want to do serious

CS2's dreamweaver, equally powerful and I'll be using that for CSS design.

I haven't opened CS3's dreamweaver yet.

Heaven help me!