actionscript guidance
by Carol M. Brizzi
on
Apr 15, 2005 at 2:58:18 am
OK...so now I know to use moviel clips rather than scenes in constructing a linear movie. I understand that to control the movie clips, which need to follow each other in sequence, I need to use actionscript but after hours of reading through manuals and web sites I am not much closer to understanding how to go about doing this. I understand that what I need to trigger is a series of system events but I am not sure whether to treat each clip separately or to use an Array. Any clues as to how to proceed, ways to think about this, articles to read etc. would be greatly appreciated.
TIA~~Carol
Re: actionscript guidance by Carol M. Brizzi on Apr 16, 2005 at 2:12:12 am
I am working in flash for the first time. I am putting together a 2-3 minute linear piece consisting of animated text, still images and some streamed audio. From my reading and from an earlier answer to a question about a strategy for putting all this together, I have decided to use movie clips and to load the jpegs dynamically .
From this conceptual understanding I am now trying to figure out how to do this. I have the equivalent of 20 story board panels. Most of them will be text over images with the first four panels being text only. I have started to make separate files of each panel of animated text with the idea of making them into movie clips and loading them into the final timeline. I want them to run sequentially with no interactivity other than optional stop, play functions. I am looking for suggestions and caveats in using actionscript to start the first panel and when it is done to stop it and to go to the next automatically so that it will play through all the clips in that fashion. I do have some information on loading JPEGs externally so hopefully I can figure out how to get that interfaced with the text animations.
Hopefully that better describes what I am trying to do.
Thanks~~Carol
Re: actionscript guidance by LeeBrimelow on Apr 16, 2005 at 2:59:35 am
Lets say that the fiurst part of you movie is in a file called first.swf. This is the one that would be in your HTML file. Then whenever you want to load another movie just write...
_root.loadMovie("URL TO YOUR NEXT FILE");
Just make sure that it is the same dimensions as the original. If you wanted to get more technical you could use the the new MovieClipLoader object which makes loading SWFs and JPEGs even better. But the above way is all you need in order to load a new movie.
Re: actionscript guidance by Peter Ralph on Apr 16, 2005 at 7:34:24 pm
use movie clips definitely -
btw for $25 you can get a 1 month subscription to lynda.com - their flash tutorial CDs are top notch - step by step instructions for incorporating movie clips and controlling them with actionscript
Re: actionscript guidance by Carol M. Brizzi on Apr 16, 2005 at 5:37:56 pm
Thank you Lee. If I understand you correctly you are saying to start integrating the separate modules by loading them into the player after they are rendered into SWFs ? I was under the impression that it would be best to make Movieclips for each segment and assemble them in the main timeline. Or are you referring to loading the jpegs on the fly ?
TIA~~Carol
Re: actionscript guidance by LeeBrimelow on Apr 17, 2005 at 12:00:51 am
If you can keep your filesize at a reasonable level then yes you should just use MovieClips. You only need to load external SWF files if you want to balance the users downloads across your movie. Also logical breakpoints, the places where you might have used scenes, are good places to make a separate SWF file. But its all up to preference and what is best for the end user.
