Chapter 16. Delivering Movies to Your Audience

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When you finish creating graphics, animation, and interactivity in Macromedia Flash MX, it's time to deliver the goods to your audience. You must export the Flash movie file to another format for playback. You have several formats to choose among. The one that guarantees viewers will see all your animations and take part in all your movie's interactivity is the Flash Player format. Player files end with the extension .swf.

Installing Flash MX also installs version 6 of the Flash Player application. You can view .swf files running directly in Flash Player on your computer. Other programs, such as Web browsers, can control Flash Player, too.

You can export movies as a series of images in either bitmap format (.GIF or .PNG files, for example) or vector format (such as Adobe Illustrator files). Another option for movie delivery is a self-playing file called a projector. Users double-click the projector file to open and play the movie. And you can print your entire movie or individual frames, should you want to give someone a hard-copy version of the movie (for storyboarding, for example). Flash MX also lets you control viewers' ability to print selected frames, or all frames , from Flash Player's contextual menu or from buttons or movie clips via the print action.

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