Rounded, transparent corners in Flash CS5

Question

I am using Flash CS5 to make a slideshow of images: 4-5 images that fade, transitioning into the other. I would like to make it so that the corners of the entire slideshow are rounded and transparent. I want to do this on the slideshow level as opposed to just editing the images themselves so that this slideshow can serve as a template where any images can be dropped into it.

The person that worked at this position before me made some templates with rounded corners, but I cannot figure out how to duplicate how he did it. As far as I can tell, he merely made a layer on top of all of the other layers and filled in the area he wanted to be transparent with white. When I do the same it doesn't work, so there must be a step I am missing.

Answer 1

I think the best and easiest way is to use a (clipping) mask. To do this in the Flash GUI/IDE:

• put the box with the rounded corners on the stage

• make a new layer in the timeline and put the pictures there

• make sure the layer with the pictures is below the first one

• right-click the top layer and click 'mask'

Otherwise: I don't know if your predecessor used Actionscript (the programming language for making Flash media) and if you know how that works? I would share some Actionscript code with you, but I'm not sure if that's allowed here. For that matter, you could always ask on StackOverflow.com.

Answer 2

Difficult to understand from your description. Probably he used masked layers. The mask should be in a movieclip using cache as bitmap. Search on internet for flash + mask + image and you'll find a lot about it.

If you can use actionscript you can work directly on bitmap data, but I think it's too complicated for the experience you seem to have.