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Testing:

Press Ctrl+M (Mac: Command) to test your movie. Another document window will open and your movie will begin playing right away. Flash will continue looping the movie until you either hit the Stop button on the controls or close the test movie window.

Saving:

Generally it's a good idea to save your movie file right after you've opened a new document, and set the basic properties for your movie. Go to the File menu and choose 'Save' (Ctrl+Shift+S). Choose where you want the file saved, and click the Save button.

Tip: As you're going along creating your movie, it's a smart idea to press Ctrl+S every so often to save your work up to that point. I do this about every 10-15 minutes generally.

Publishing:

When your movie is complete and you're ready to save it for use on the Web, there are a few options you'll need to set up first to make sure it's getting saved the way you need it to be.

a) To start with, go to the File menu and choose Publish Settings. When the window opens you'll see a number of Tabs with options you can set. The first one is the FORMATS Tab. Here you have various 'Types' of formats you can save your file as. By default, Flash 4 should have these 3 settings already checked:

Type:

Flash.swf
HTML.html

These 2 options are essential to creating a Flash movie for the Web. The other options below these are 'user specific' options. The most important of them being the GIF.gif option. This is recommended to be chosen for those visitors that will not have the Flash plugin when viewing the page with your movie in it. It will tell Flash to create a static Gif image to put in place of the movie should this situation arise. It will also instruct Flash to insert the necessary 'browser checking' script into your HTML file.

The other option that is checked by default is the file name(s) of your movie file:

File name:

Use default names.

Your files will have the same name as you gave your movie, when (or if) you saved it at the beginning. If you'd rather name them yourself, simply uncheck the option box and type in your own name(s) beside each of the file types you're creating.

b) Next to the Format tab is the FLASH tab.

For the purposes of the simple movie exercise we're working on here, we'll leave these settings where they are.

c) And the last tab we should have for this example is the HTML tab.

Here we have options for telling Flash how we'd like it to handle/create the html file that will render our movie in a Web page.

Template:

Flash Only (Default) - this will not save a static Gif image for users that don't have the Flash plugin. To make Flash save a static Gif version of your movie, choose 'Flash 4 with Image'. (just above the default setting in the menu)

Note - to create a proper static version of your movie, forward it to the frame you'd like to use before Publishing. Or, you can create a totally different image in another program. Just be sure to create it with the same dimensions your movie has. And be sure to type the images name in the FILENAME options box under the FORMATS tab before you publish your movie.

Dimension:

The default option here is "Match Movie". And that's the one we want for our simple example.

Playback:

Generally the "Display Menu" and "Loop" options will be checked here. If your movie has a Start button (like the example here), then you would uncheck the "Loop" option, and check the "Paused at Start" option. But you won't need to do that here, just leave them at the defaults.

For our example, the rest of the options will be left at their default settings. I'd suggest going through the online help files to get an understanding of what these other options are for.

1. Understanding the Stage and Timelines
2. Making a Movie - Step by Step Example
3. Testing and Publishing
4. The Finished Item
5. Tips

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