I would like go ahead and bring up another document, just so we can see what a standard document would look like without all the graphics in it.
So, I am going to up to the file menu. I will just choose New. And we will get a little different dialog but you might notice that these settings are very similar. In fact, they are the same as what we saw when we originally saw that splash green come up. I have got the templates tab. And I also got a general tab which will allow me to make general documents as we go through. That will give me a little description on this side of what kind of document we are going to get.
I am going to stick with the standard flash document. I will open it up. Now, you can see I got the base white stage as my background color setting, as a default. My layers have emptied out quite a bit. So, we will of course be filling those up a little bit later as we go along.
The movie comes in with an untitled name and you can see the tab. In fact, this tab is what I am going to be using for switching movies back and forth. I can go back and work on my Flash flash movie or I can continue to work on my untitled movies just by clicking on it there.
Whenever you create a new movie, that is the perfect time to go down and set up those base movie settings. Now, you can change all of these during the course of your movie and switch around if you like. But it is also a good time to be thinking about what your movie is going to be. For instance, the size, so you are gonna be making a small thin banner. You might want to go with something like 200 pixels for the height and may be 650 for the width. And we could be making a quick banner project, again, using my hand tool.
So, you can reconfigure movie size to whatever you want. Now, if you change your mind in the middle of a presentation, it would not affect any of the contents of your movie. But obviously the area of the stage is going to change. So, certain things that were on screen before might end up being off. You can change your background color that we showed.
Another important thing to be thinking about at the beginning of your movie also is showed down here in the published settings. And that is probably worth a little bit of a discussion at this point, so we can be thinking about it later. And that is the player file.
I did mention that when you publish your movies, your SWF file is going to be looking for a player apt to play these things back. We have got several versions of player just like we have several versions of flash. If I go into a publish settings, this is a master area or we can set up all kinds of things about how our SWF file is going to be made. But the one I want to talk about right now is just that player version.
Now, if you are publishing to an audience that has the most current player, perfect! We will also be setting up our movie so that we can check to see what version of the player my user has and may be suggest to them that they upgrade it. But for our purposes, I will be looking at player specifically in terms of features. Now, there will be some certain features of Flash Development application Version 8 that will only work when the user has player version 8. If I am not using any of those features, I can very easily publish from this program a previous version of Flash to be suitable for playing back on some other version of the player.
As we work to the rest of the lessons, I will definitely be pointing out to you when we are using features that are specific to the Flash 8 player. I will also try to include features from the earlier versions as well. It is not a bad idea to get familiar with what things work with what player, especially if you know you are going to be publishing to an earlier player audience.
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