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Publishing Your Flash Movies

After you've made a dazzling Flash movie complete with Motion tweens, 3D simulations, and ActionScripted interactivity, you need to make the Flash movie usable for the intended delivery medium — the Web, a CD- or DVD-ROM, or a QuickTime Flash movie, to name a few. As we mentioned in the introduction to this book, you need the Flash 8 application to open .fla files. Because the Flash Player plug-in uses .swf files, you need to export or publish your .fla file in a format that your audience can use. More importantly, Flash documents are authoring documents, while Flash movies are optimized for the shortest delivery times and maximum playback performance.

You can convert your Flash document files (.fla) to Flash movies files (.swf) by using either the File ð Export Movie, Control ð Test Movie, or File ð Publish/Publish Settings command. You can specify just about all file format properties in one step using the File ð Publish Settings command. After you've entered the settings, the File ð Publish command exports any and all file formats with your specified parameters in one step — all from the Flash 8 application.

Cross Reference 

The Export Movie and Export Image commands are discussed throughout the book. For more information on exporting still images in raster/bitmap formats, see Chapter 36, "Working with Raster Graphics," included as a PDF fie on this book's CD-ROM. To export vector formats, see Chapter 37, "Working with Vector Graphics," which is also included on the CD-ROM. To export QuickTime or AVI files, see "Exporting Animation" from the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Bible by Robert Reinhardt and Snow Dowd (Wiley, 2003) in the online archive at www.flashsupport.com/archive.

Three commands are available with the Publish feature: Publish Settings, Publish Preview, and Publish. We discuss each of these commands in the following sections.


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