Flash 8 solves a minor design annoyance that has irked me over the years. When I use _alpha, the underlying structure of a movie clip becomes visible. Where there is overlap, you get an additive opacity and it just all looks “wrong.” In Flash 8, this still happens be default, but when you apply certain filters, the movie clip becomes an image, and that image will fade in and out just as if you had imported a png (even though it is still interactive).
Here is an example of what I mean. After you click to start the fading, you will see the wing of the ship, along with a text message I threw in there for fun. If you click “Apply Filter,” a displacement map filter is added (though the map is blank to not warp the movie at all). You’ll see that the ship immediately starts fading in and out as a single element, not as a bunch of pieces together.
It would be interesting to benchmark different filters to see if any single filter is more efficient, and could be used when a designer/developer wanted to achieve a seamless fade like this.
Actually, the official way to do this is set the blend mode to “layer”. This causes it to pre-composite the movieclip prior to applying alpha. This actually happens with any blend mode (other than normal), but layer lets you get this effect without affecting the MC’s appearance otherwise. Cheers.
thanks grant. good to know. much better way. I keep forgetting about those blend modes