Projecting Your Image - Flash

Once you've created a Flash movie, it's common to immediately export it as an SWF file and embed it into a Web page. However, Flash also allows you to export your movie in various other formats. For example, if you take a look at the File -> Export Movie command, you'll see that Flash allows you to export your movie as a Windows AVI file, an animated GIF, a sequence of standalone GIF, JPEGs or bitmaps, an Adobe Illustrator document, an AutoCAD document, and a Windows Metafile.

Similarly, if all you want is a single still from the movie, you can select the frame and use the File -> Export Image command to export the selected frame as a GIF, JPEG, PNG or BMP image.

And finally, you can also export your Flash movie to a standalone executable, which can be played back on any PC. In order to do this, you need to use something called a Projector, which provides a "wrapper" capable of playing back a Flash movie.

To create a Flash projector, first export the movie as an SWF file, and then open the exported file in the standalone player which ships with Flash 5. Use the File -> Create Projector command to create a single executable which contains a stripped-down Flash player and your movie clip. You can then distribute this Projector to friends, clients and old girlfriends.

And that's about it for this week. Next week, I'll be wrapping this tutorial up with a explanation of how you can add sound to your Flash movie, and use GIF, JPEG and other pixel-based images in your Flash movies. See you then!

This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.

>>> More Flash Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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