Scenes and Movie Clips

So how do you decide whether to use scenes, movie clips, or separate movies to organize your content? You start with this thought: scenes are convenient . Everything is available inside of one Flash movie. However, there are some issues you need to be aware of if you plan to use scenes. Having a large movie organized by breaking it up into scenes still means you have one large movie ”and that means increased download time. In addition, scenes reset any variables that you might be using to pass information. Scenes also reset any sounds.

Breaking up a large movie into separate movie clips doesn't solve the file size problem, but it does make your work more modular and reusable. Also, movie clips are considered objects in Flash 5 (don't worry, objects are discussed in detail in Chapter 14). You'll find that you have a tremendous amount of control over movie clips using ActionScript.

If you can break up your movie into a series of separate movies, you can use ActionScript to load content only when it's needed. This "only as necessary" loading leads to a smaller download time and the users only need to download what they want to see rather than downloading your entire creation.

The truth is that no one technique is perfect for every situation. You'll probably find yourself using some combination of the above.

Now that you've explored the timeline, it's time to put something on the Stage!