Publishing a Movie


After you have completely authored a movie and it's ready to go up on your Web site, you need to tell the authoring tool to publish it. This takes the .fla file that was created when you started the chapter and converts it into an .swf file. An .swf file is playable in the Flash Player, which embeds in the Web browser. The sole purpose of the authoring tool is to allow you to create .fla files and then convert them into .swf.

Note  

Before you publish, you must save. Use the File pull-down menu and select Save. That way you can name your movie and choose a directory for it to live in. If you do not save, you might have a hard time finding your files after you close Flash.

When it's actually time to do the .fla-to-.swf conversion, which is called publishing a movie, you must consider several options that can be used to customize the way your movie looks in the browser. To look at them, use the File pull-down menu to select Publish Settings.

This opens up a dialog box with several pages of options, shown in Figure 1.19. Feel free to look through these options, but we'll discuss most of them later in the book, so I'll leave them alone now. At this point, it's only important to note that on the first page of options, labeled Formats, both the Flash and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) boxes are checked. This causes Flash to create both the .swf file that is the final movie and an HTML document that contains it and can be read by a Web browser. After you click the Publish button, you can view your movie by looking at the HTML document it creates in your Web browser.

click to expand
Figure 1.19: Many settings can be altered to customize the way that a movie is published.
Tip  

If you want to see how your movie will look in the browser without going to the trouble of publishing and then loading the HTML in your browser, you can select Publish Preview from the File pull-down menu. Flash then opens your browser and puts a temporary version of your movie into it.




Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Programming
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Programming (Premier Press Game Development)
ISBN: 1592000363
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 161

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