Adobe's new Flash CS3 has built-in components to support captioning.  Captioning your Flash content has never been easier!  This short tutorial will show you how.

The new captioning components in Flash work by reading in an XML file containing the caption formating and timing data.  The first step is to generate a Flash caption file; of course, we recommend that you use Automatic Sync Technologies' CaptionSync server to get your caption file quickly and inexpensively.

First, gather up your media file.  I will assume here that your movie file is likely in some other format such as a QuickTime movie or a Windows Media file.  In this example, I will use a short Windows Media movie.  Next, log into your AST account and submit your movie for captioning.  

Submitting your movie is as simple as filling out this Program Submission form.  We are going to have this program transcribed.  Select our media file; there is our Windows media movie. 

And then click the "Advanced Settings" tab to select the output types that you need.  You can select as many as you like, but make sure to include the Flash DFXP format, for captioning.  Then click the Apply Changes button, and go ahead submit your program for captioning.

When your movie has been captioned, the CaptionSync server will email the results back to you; save them in the same location that you have your movie stored.  I have them right here, as returned by the CaptionSync server.

Next, lets start up Flash CS3.  We'll open an ActionScript 3 document, and then bring in our movie using the File Import function.  Import Video.  There is our movie file.  This will convert your source movie to Flash's native FLV format.  Next we need to select our video encoding options, but we're just going to leave them as the default for this demo.  Then select the skin - there are many skins to choose from but make sure you choose one with the captioning feature built in.

Got to give our project a name, and then we can import our video. 

When the import is complete, a FLV Playback icon will appear on your stage.

Now, if you do not already have the "components" window up, use the Window menu to pull up the components window.  Double click on the "FLV Playback Captioning" component to put it on your stage.

At this point, there are two ways to go.  The default behavior is to have the caption window overlay the video, much like a TV display.  The second option is to have the captions appear outside of the video window.  Let's start with the default behavior because it is a little bit easier.

Ensure the Captioning Component is selected on your stage, then click the "Parameters" tab below.  Make the following settings:  set the caption Target Name to "auto".  Set the auto Layout to "true".  Set the Simple Formating to "false".  And finally, set the source field to point to the XML caption file that you got from AST.

And that is all there is to it.  You can now publish your Flash movie.  And then we can launch the swf file that results, and you will see the captions.  There is our swf file, named Test.swf, which is what we named the project.  And you can use the CC button  to toggle the captions on and off.

Now, let's look at the case where you want the captions to appear in a separate area from the video region.  To do this, open the "User Interface" area of your components window and find the "Text Area" component.  Drag it out onto your stage and position it where you'd like the captions to appear.  With the "Text Area" selected, click the "Properties" tab below.  Let's set the width to be the same as our video window (240 in this case), and set the height to be sufficient to contain 2 lines of caption data.  Note that the height setting is important - if you do not make it sufficiently high to contain your caption data, the second line of captioning will not appear at all.

Ok, now let's assign a name to this component so that we can refer to it in other components.  Let's call this one "CapArea".  Once this is done, return to your stage and select the captioning playback component again.  Next, click the "Parameters" tab below again.  This time, we'll make some slight changes to the parameter settings; make the following settings:  set the caption Target Name to the label that you gave to the Text Area ("CapArea" in this case).  Set the auto Layout to "false".  Set the Simple Formating to "false".  And finally, set the source field again to point to the XML caption file that you got from AST.

Once again, publish your Flash movie. Ok, let's take a look at it.  We'll launch the swf file that resulted.  And you see the captions now appear in the window below.  And the caption button will toggle them on and off just as before.

That's it!  With AST's CaptionSync server, captioning your Flash content is simple and fast!