Now while we are on basic layout, you might notice that the movie that we were working on shows up in a little tab at the top. The tab shows the name of the movie file and also every once in a while, you will see little asterisk there on the side.
Now, a couple of things we need to talk about. The asterisk basically the same that we have made some kind of change to our movie file that has not been save to disc. So, if you glance up there and see and asterisk, you know you can hit save out of the file menu. Just normal save and you save all your changes.
I did not really make any changes, but I think I have opened up enough panels in here at the program probably things I did. With that save, you can see the asterisk is gone.
Now, another thing worth mentioning, probably at this point is that we are working on a .FLA file. Now, you Mac users might have just named your file and you would not see the extension on the end, but we have basic difference between the file types we are going to be working on.
The FLA file is going to be our master file. It is going to be the edit file that we use to setup all of our animations and all of our elements and to be able to edit and change all of those things.
Now, that FLA file is going to be pretty big because it includes everything, you know, our movie file. When we set this movie file out, most normally we are going to be making at .SWF extension. One way to do that would be to just simply export the movie which I was showing here under the file menu.
Now, we will create from this a compressed file that is in SWF playback file and that is generally what I am probably going to put up on my website on your HTML pages. It is going to be that small file that the users pull up.
Worth mentioning at this point is also the player. I think a lot of people have experienced with this because of just viewing flash files and working some other things. But, most of our SWF files is going to be dependent on some kind of a player being on the user’s machine in order to play this file back.
That might be in the form of a stand alone player, or could be a plug-in in a popular browser like explorer. So, worth mentioning that we will be seeing some other file formats here, but we where working on that FLA file as it is now.
One other basic control is just look at your movie.
Now, I have got a little animation setup in this one. We are going to be getting to animation pretty soon in our lessons. But, if you want to playback your animations, we will be looking at some of these things out of the control menu up here at the top.
Some basic things that the control menu can do; right of the top of your play, rewind, go to the end, if I hit play, we can see our little animation as it goes through. We got a little introduction to flash there, couple of moving things but you can see, your animation playing pretty much at full speed. And this is basically what you are use it would see if you published the movie file.
I am going to do one other thing out of the control menu here and we will be doing this a lot during our production, and that is test movie.
This is a great way to see what your movies looking like and look at it a little more in an environment like what your users actually going to see. It will run full speed for them, but it will also kind of crap it off in the movie.
Now, if I do a test movie, it will pull up in the window and there you can see -- you are not seeing the paste up area on the side. You seeing it crapped out pretty much exactly as the files are going to be shown for the end users as it goes in.
I will also point out that we are looking at a swift file right now. The test movie feature out of control will actually export your movie just like I have showed out of the file menu. Create a swift file, load it up and you really watching the results of the export movie as you go through.
This is going to be one of our primary ways to preview our movies as we go along.
Couple of other basic things that we want to look at, I just want to point this out for now. I am not going to make a
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