When last we visited switching to Combustion 2 from After Effects, I had just finished explaining how to bring all of your native Photoshop files into Combustion with almost as much flexibility as After Effects itself gives you. That's all fine and good and what-not, but you may be wondering just what the mass of charcoal and nonstandard (to Mac and Windows users, anyway) interface elements that make up the Combustion interface can even do now that you've managed to get footage into it. However, once you get past the obvious difference in appearances between the two programs, you'll find that learning the Combustion interface is more an extension of a language you already know rather than learning something new from scratch.

Last time we looked at morph targets as a character animation technique, and by my count, that particular piece contained no less than 57,491 instances of the word "morph." As we press on to the exciting world of handles, it's my personal goal to surpass that number in this article, aiming for a cool 60,000 mentions of "handles." By the end of this series (which will, mercifully, come with the next installment), there will probably be a great many words you will likely wish you've never heard of, but for now, I'll just concentrate on making you sick to death of the word "handles" and all its various derivatives.

It's been quite some time since I've revisited this somewhat long-running series, and while I've had pressing issues such as the annual springtime mulch-a-thon and "Must See TV" to tend to, I figured what the hey, might as well crank out another QuickTime Authoring piece that I know DMN readers are so anxiously awaiting. This time we're going to set our sights on a program that many of you already have but may not be using in this capacity: Macromedia's Flash MX.