Flash 8 Cookbook

Chapter 11. Managing Movie Clips

Movie clips are among the most important types of symbols in your Flash movies from several standpoints. First of all, movie clip timelines are able to play back independently. This means that you can create movies within movies. Using movie clips correctly can help organize your Flash document and make your main timeline much more manageable.

Secondly, movie clips can be programmatically controlled—much more so than any other types of symbol instances. Graphic symbol instances cannot be controlled by ActionScript at all, and button symbol instances can be controlled only in a limited sense. But when you begin to work with ActionScript, you begin to use more and more movie clips in your movies.

As you can read in the recipes in this chapter, by using ActionScript you can perform many types of actions in your Flash movies. For example, you can adjust the transparency, color, and rotation of a movie clip instance using ActionScript. You can also use ActionScript to create duplicates of existing instances or even to create new instances of movie clips that exist only in the library. You can use ActionScript to create all kinds of animation effects, such as fades.

Although the recipes in this chapter are intended to demonstrate how you can introduce some basic ActionScript to begin creating more advanced Flash movies, non-code-based solutions are also included.

Many of the recipes in this chapter rely on functions for some of the more advanced portions of ...