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Chapter 6. Lights, Camera, Movie Clips!

In This Chapter

• Exploring movie clip uses and advantages

• Creating and updating movie clips

• Previewing movie clip animation

• Transforming and tweening movie clip instances

• Modifying your movie clips

• Using the new 3D Translation and 3D Rotation tools

Complicated machines, such as an automobile, are made from many smaller machines and moving parts. To build an automobile any other way is just not possible. Along those lines, you may find that some animations are too elaborate to create on the main Timeline alone. You'll want to break them down into smaller animations that can be brought together as part of a larger animation.

You'll also find that your movie may need to reuse several, identical animations. (Think about the four spinning wheels on a car.) For these cases, you have movie clips.

What Are Movie Clips?

The movie clip is a powerful and versatile symbol type that can include entire, independent animations, yet be placed and maintained in your movie just as easily as graphic symbols. It's one of three symbol types in Flash, and just like graphic symbols (see Chapter 3 of this minibook), they can be easily duplicated and maintained from a single master symbol in the library.

Movie clips are unique in that each one contains its very own timeline that looks and works just like the main Timeline. This timeline is completely self-contained, so animations in movie clips don't depend on or rely on the length of an animation contained within the main Timeline. ...