HomeFlash Page 7 - Flash 101 (part 6): The Final Countdown
The Scenic Route - Flash
In the final part of our introductory Flash tutorial, find outhow to add sound to your Flash movie, organize your movie into scenes,share symbols across different movie clips, and import GIFs and JPEGs intoyour animation sequence.
In the best traditions of Broadway, Flash allows you to divide a movie into "scenes", independent sequences which are played back one after the other. Scenes comes in handy when you need to organize your Flash movie into different sections.
You can add a new Scene via the Window -> Panels -> Scene panel; this is also the place to go if you need to remove a scene from the movie, or alter the order in which the scenes are played out.
Flash also allows you to use ActionScript (specifically, the Go To action) to add interactivity to your movie by jumping to specific scenes in response to user input.
Finally, Flash also allows you to share the symbols you create in one Flash movie with other Flash movies, a capability referred to as "shared libraries". In order to do this, you must mark the symbols you’d like to share by exporting them; you can do this from the Linkage menu command on the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click the symbol. Remember to include an identifier for the symbol as well.
Once all shared symbols have been exported in this manner, you can save your Flash movie - the shared library will be stored with it. You can now access the symbols within this Flash movie from any other movie via the File -> Open As Shared Library command. Once a shared library is opened, you can use symbols from it as you normally would, by dragging them on to the Stage.
Note, however, that shared libraries typically appear in a dull gray colour, indicating that you cannot modify the symbols contained within them.
When you publish a Flash movie containing symbols from a shared library, you must ensure that the shared library is also available to this movie. If Flash cannot find the shared library, the Flash movie will not play back correctly.
And that about covers it. Hopefully, you now know enough about Flash to begin using it for your own animation clips and Web effects. If you’d like to read more and perhaps learn a little bit more about ActionScript and advanced Flash techniques, write to me and I’ll see what I can do.
Till next time...stay healthy!
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.
