Image Strip

For the interactive parts and most of the animations for this tutorial, I made use of the BitmapData feature of Adobe Flash, which is available from version 8.0.
BitmapData in Adobe Flash allows you to generate bitmap images and/or alter pixels of a bitmap image. Every separate pixel in an existing image or generated image is accessible through ActionScript, the programming language inside Adobe Flash. You can either read or write the color value of a specific pixel. Besides reading/writing pixels you can use BitmapData to generate all kinds of effects, such as noise, dissolves, and much more.

This part of the tutorial only describes the use of BitmapData without ActionScript code. Go to the 'Adobe Flash' chapter for an ActionScript example.

I could have used flash video (FLV) but this would have resulted in a loss of quality due to compression and a much larger file size... If you read this line again you'll probably notice a problem: quality loss and an increase in file size... not a good combination!
In this specific case BitmapData solved both problems.

the complete page is available in the commercial version of this tutorial.