Re: FLASH: two ways of defining movie clip?

[Paul Hagwood]

Dave wrote:

>How do I know when I need movie clip behavior?  I have a vague 

interpretation

>that says when I want it to "be like a movie, with its own actions and 

lots

>of layers and sound", then it should be a movie clip.  But what about

>relatively minor things such as a pair of moving lips used for lip 

syncing

>dialog, or a pair of running legs?   Should these be movie clips, or

>symbols with graphic behavior that are animated?


Someone may have already answered this, but I'll give a stab at trying 

to help you out. A 'graphic' symbol can contain animation and a 

'movieclip' can contain animation but the two are very different in 

flash. The main difference that I've seen is that a 'graphic' symbol is 

dependant on the time-line. That means that as long as the playback head 

is moving, then people will see the animation in your graphic. But if 

the playback head stops, then your animation will stop. No big deal if 

that is what you want to happen. 

A 'movie-clip' is NOT dependant on the timeline. If the playback head 

(the little triangle at the top of the time-line) stops, a 'movie-clip' 

symbol will keep right on animating if that is what you have told it to 

do. So movie-clip symbols are very usefull for things like animated 

buttons. Because with an animated button, you need the animation to not 

be dependant on the main movie time-line. Also, movie-clips are great 

for creating more interactivity within the flash file via the 

tell-target action. However, I don't want to speak to that too much, 

because I'm learning about it myself. 


Hope this helps some people who are new to Flash. 


___________________________________

Paul Hagwood

Multimedia Designer

http://www.mindspring.com/~hagwood/



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