Adobe invested much into integrating several of its original applications with the ones it recently acquired from Macromedia in its CS3 Suite of products. Much of that focus went into making the workflow from Illustrator to Flash easier. When you think about it, they're a natural fit since they're both based on vector design. (Fireworks also does well in this area and already has a great workflow with Flash)

For this example, I wanted to create a text animation titled "Rough Surf". I needed the text to appear to be waving and I knew the easiest way to create this effect was to use Illustrator's Warp Tool. As you can see below, I created five duplicate layers and then used the warp tool in each layer to warp each text copy independently.

(First: In Illustrator "Select All" and in Flash go to "Edit > Paste in Place")

Copying the Layers to Flash

It's a piece of cake to import all five layers into Flash. Go to Select All > Copy. Launch Flash and go to Edit > Paste in Place. A box will appear asking you how you would like Flash to paste the Illustrator objects. It's a good idea to choose "Paste using AI File Importer preferences" and have both "Apply recommended import settings to resolve incompatibilities" and "Maintain layers" checked to ensure that the object(s) remain editable, keep their intended appearance (if there were effects applied) and remain on their original layers - including Folders.

In Flash's Library are all of the objects that were in my original Illustrator file. They imported in as Grouped Objects but I converted them to Movie Clips. You don't have to for this effect.

Creating the Animation

When I pasted the layers, each text object (grouped object), were all on Frame 1 on the timeline in their own layer. Obviously, to create a frame by frame animation, you'll need each object to be on their own keyframe. (See below.) Now all that's left to do is test out the animation and get sea sick!

I know this was a quick look at the Illustrator - Flash workflow, however I wanted to show how easy it is to simply copy and paste vector objects created in Illustrator into Flash. For warped animated text effects this is probably about the simplest approach.

Further Resources:

Download Flash File (FLA)