Hour 12. Animating Using Movie Clip and Graphic Symbols

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What You'll Learn in This Hour:

  • How to make and use nested clips

  • That a movie clip is a symbol with its own independent Timeline

  • How Movie Clip symbols are fundamentally different from Graphic symbols

  • That movie clips are addressable

When you see what Movie Clip symbols can do, you'll be blown away. Inside a movie clip, you can create an animation and then animate an instance of that clip. This means, for example, that you can create a rotating wheel clip and then animate the rotating wheel so that it not only rotates but moves across the screen as well. Symbols, as a general concept, should not be new to you. You learned quite a bit about them in Hour 4, "Using the Library for Productivity." Probably the biggest benefit of symbols is that, while you keep one master version in the Library, you can use as many instances of the symbol as you like throughout a movie, with no significant impact on file size. You should also recall from Hour 8, "Using Motion Tweens to Animate," that the object you tween must be an instance of a symbol. I'm sure you've also noticed that any time you create a symbol, Flash asks whether the symbol should have the symbol behavior Movie Clip, Button, or Graphic. Next hour you'll learn all about buttons, but this hour you'll learn as much as you can about animating with Movie Clip and Graphic symbols.

This hour doesn't try to summarize all the uses for movie clips because there is so much to say that I couldn't cover everything. The primary goal of this hour is for you to understand movie clips and how they compare to plain old Graphic symbols.

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    Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 8 in 24 Hours
    Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 8 in 24 Hours
    ISBN: 0672327546
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 235

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