One program I have always wanted to learn was Flash. I have wanted to learn Flash for several years now and I have tried several times either completely on my own or using various books. Neither of these options helped me much. I am one of those people that learn better by seeing than by reading. Finally, however Total Training the worlds best training products company (at least in this reviewer’s opinion) has finally come out with training videos for Flash 8 Professional. I immediately jumped at the chance to review them because I have used Total Trainings products in the past to learn programs such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop and more, all with great success. So I had equally high hopes for their new Flash 8 Professional training product. Needless to say I was not disappointed.

 

Like with the rest of Total Trainings products the ones for Flash 8 Professional are very in-depth and very complete and they are done by a great instructor. It has always impressed me how Total Training manages to get the best instructors possible for their products. Flash 8 Professional is no exception. The instructor for these videos is John Ulliman who is an authorized instructor for Macromedia's studio of products and principal of his own project development company, where he works closely with major multimedia software companies. John has been teaching ever since he first started using a computer. Currently, he focuses on the products he uses to make animation magic work, with the intention to bring as much practical experience to his lessons as possible and this shows in the Flash 8 Professional training videos.

 

Starting in 2005 Total Training moved away from DVD-Video training products and went for a computer based multimedia type of format. Before this you could play the Total Training videos either on your DVD player connected to your TV or on your computer (with the appropriate DVD-Video playback software). As I have said in other Total Training reviews I wasn’t thrilled with this change… at least at first. Having now been through several of their products in this new format I can say that this is a much better way to go. Not only are their now fewer discs to mess with, but you now get features that you didn’t get with the DVD-Video formatted ones.

 

With DVD-Video you could jump from section to section with no problems. For example if you want to go to the section on “Creating Animations” you could simply by using the chapter menu on the disc or the skip button. But, that was about it. When you stopped the video for the day and came back later you had to find where you left off yourself. With the new Multimedia based products you can not only easily go from lesson to lesson but sub-topic to sub-topic with in each of those lessons and when you stop the videos for the day it remembers right where you left off and picks up from there when you come back, even if you stop in the middle of a section. Other benefits of this new format are you can create bookmarks for areas of the videos that you will want to visit again. With bookmarks you almost have the ability to create your own custom lesson plan.

 

If you have a computer with dual displays things get even better. You can have the training running on one display and the actual program running on the other. This means you can work along with the training. This is made even easier since each Total Training video package includes all of the files used in the training. And, of course like the old DVD-Video based products you have all of the standard controls like play, pause, stop, fast forward, rewind, etc. So you can pause and play the video any time you need. If you only have a single display on your computer you can still work along with the video. You will just need to pause the video and then go to the program and try out what was just covered, it is a bit more time consuming, but still very workable.

 

For training there is only one company I trust to not only do the job right, but to do it perfectly and that is Total Training. They have the best instructors, each of their products is incredibly in-depth (better than the courses from my local collage), the information (course outline) is always done in an easy to use and follow fashion and the instructors are very good at making even the most complex program easy to understand and learn. The Flash 8 Professional videos sure got me up to speed with Flash and just because I have been through all of the material doesn’t mean I won’t be going back to refresh on subjects that are more complex or subjects that I don’t use often. That is the other nice thing about these videos, they not only work as a full course, but as great references too and that in part is because of the way you can access the topics of each of the main lessons. It is even better than an indexed book.