Getting Into Flash Animation And Flash Video

I’ve been focusing more on creative work as I’ve been planning to. I gathered together my books on Flash and ActionScript which I will finally get around to reading. I’m interested in Flash now because it can be used for animation. Tonight I ordered a book on using Flash with After Effects. Over the weekend I added to my notes on Illustrator. Vector graphics are often used for cartoon animation. Flash may not be so difficult for me to learn now that I am familiar with vector graphics in Illustrator and timelines in After Effects. Virtually every video site is using the Flash Player to deliver videos so it is about time that I explored it in depth.

But I’m still doing some technical research. Recently I learned how to use PHP to create a HTML table that will open as an Excel spreadsheet in the browser. I also learned a lot more about parsing XML files using PHP.  This was for a PHP version of my YouTube data backup script. I even did a little of the work on my iBook G4 which can run PHP scripts.

Today I did some research on scripting Fiddler. Automating Fiddler interests me because I want to figure out how to download Flash video files from various web sites and Fiddler can reveal the web address that the SWF files are calling. Scripting Fiddler is extremely difficult and counter-intuitive so it took me hours just to figure out some basic procedures. Automating a video download using Fiddler seems promising but I may need to jump through many hoops. For example, it can dump a session with everything the browser downloaded and all the requests it made but this is compressed into a ZIP file so I’d have to unzip that. It would also be a challenge to run Fiddler without opening its window or a browser window.