This is the fourth part of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS3 earlier this year, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Flash CS3 Professional? On Windows you need an Intel® Pentium® 4, Intel Centrino®, Intel Xeon®, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista, on Mac, PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.8 – 10.5 (Leopard), 512 MB RAM, 64 MB Video RAM, 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card, 2.5GB hard drive space and DVD-ROM Drive.

Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, is the multimedia authoring program that can be used to create web applications, games, movies, as well as content for mobile phones and other embedded devices. Originally developed and distributed by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe in 2005, Flash has a player client that is available in most common web browsers. It features support for raster as well as vector graphics, a scripting language known as ActionScript, and the ability of bi-directional streaming of both audio and video.

Flash was first introduced in 1996 and since then Flash technology has become popular for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash files; often called movies, or games, have a .swf extension can exist as an object in a web page or played in a Flash Player. Flash video files have a .flv extension and are utilized from within a .swf file.

Along with Adobe Flash CS3 Professional being the first version of Flash released under the banner of Adobe, it provides a number of changes that bring it up to date with the other Adobe products as well as add new features.

So what is new with Adobe Flash CS3 Professional?

• Native Import – Adobe Flash CS3 Professional is now fully integrated with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. There is a new paste dialog box that makes it possible to preserve functionality and structure when copying and pasting from Photoshop or Illustrator into Flash. You can even import native .PSD (Photoshop) and .AI (Illustrator) files right into the Flash CS3 layouts. This means that you can preserve layers and groups while within Flash.

• Convert animation to ActionScript 3.0 – allows you to convert timeline tween animations instantly to ActionScript 3.0. This allows you to animate visually, and then translate motion into reusable, easily editable code. This is really a time saving feature and it supports position, scale, rotation, skew, color, easing, transform center, filters, and frame properties. Even if you have not used ActionScript before, this is a perfect way to learn it.