Macromedia Flash 8 Bible

Publishing Your Flash Movies

After you've made a dazzling Flash movie complete with Motion tweens, 3D simulations, and ActionScripted interactivity, you need to make the Flash movie usable for the intended delivery medium — the Web, a CD- or DVD-ROM, or a QuickTime Flash movie, to name a few. As we mentioned in the introduction to this book, you need the Flash 8 application to open .fla files. Because the Flash Player plug-in uses .swf files, you need to export or publish your .fla file in a format that your audience can use. More importantly, Flash documents are authoring documents, while Flash movies are optimized for the shortest delivery times and maximum playback performance.

A Word about the Export Movie Command

Even though Flash streamlines the process of creating Flash movies with the Publish commands (discussed in the next section), it is worth mentioning that the File ð Export Movie command provides another route to creating an .swf file. Although the Publish command is the quickest way to create HTML-ready Flash movies, the Export Movie command can be used to create updated .swf files that have already been placed in HTML documents, or Flash movies that you intend to import into Macromedia Director movies. You can find the "Working with Director" chapter from the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Bible by Robert Reinhardt and Snow Dowd (Wiley, 2003) archived at this book's Web site, www.flashsupport.com/archives. In practice, we find that we rarely use the Export Movie command. If you don't need HTML documents published with your Flash movie, simply clear the HTML option in the Formats tab of the Publish Settings dialog box.

You can convert your Flash document files (.fla) to Flash movies files (.swf) by using either the File ð Export Movie, Control ð Test Movie, or File ð Publish/Publish Settings command. You can specify just about all file format properties in one step using the File ð Publish Settings command. After you've entered the settings, the File ð Publish command exports any and all file formats with your specified parameters in one step — all from the Flash 8 application.

Three commands are available with the Publish feature: Publish Settings, Publish Preview, and Publish. We discuss each of these commands in the following sections.