Preview a Movie Clip Without Testing

[ LiB ]

Let's say you have a movie clip nested within your Flash document in a place that takes a few clicks to get to when you're testing your movie as an SWF file. Now let's say you are making frequent changes to that movie clip and need to keep seeing the results of those changes. It's a major pain to continually test your movie and then click through or wait to get to where that clip plays. Here's a nifty trickaroo to help you with a situation like that.

Select the movie clip instance that you need to preview. Look to the Property inspector, and in the drop-down where it says Movie Clip, select Graphic. Now to the right, change Single Frame to Play Once. This changes the behavior of the instance to that of a graphic, and therefore you can preview the animation if the instance is given enough frames on the Timeline to animate. Now all you have to do is preview the movie clip's animation by scrolling through the Timeline as if the tween was actually in front of you instead of nested in the movie clip. This trick will not work if the original movie clip has actions or other nested movies in it; it only works in simple situations, but it can still be very helpful. When you're done, change the behavior back to Movie Clip.

[ LiB ]