Unit 11. Advanced. Another Movie Clips uses

We've already seen how to import and export clips from libraries coming from files .fla. Now we'll see another way to import and to export Clips that allows us a larger flexibility in the Flash use and in addition it provides us an effective interaction with other programs that are complemented with Flash and that allow us to strength their characteristics.

If we want to take the width of a movie, of which we don't have its file .fla, and to cause that it behaves in our document as if it were a Movie Clip, it's not as simple as if we had this source .fla, because while importing "the public" movie in swf format the animation is imported frame by frame.

By this, if we import the file on the main movie we would find a great number of consecutive keyframes among other things, it would spoil the appearance and the clarity of our timeline, and would prevent us to treat the movie like a whole. This represents some kind of security mechanism.

Importing frame by frame, the size of our file also increases and therefore its download time, nevertheless usually this increasing isn't so important and it's possible that having this movie and using it as Movie Clip would suit us.

In order to obtain this we must follow the following steps:

1) Create the symbol of Clip type that contains the movie. Acceding to the menu Insert → New Symbol... 

Flash will place us within the Clip automatically as if we had published it by ourselves.

2) In this situation we'll go to the menu File → Import → Import to stage.

3) We select the swf type of file and look for the movie that we want to import.

4) We press OK and we already have the movie inserted in the Clip.

If we return to the main timeline we'll see our movie taking a simple frame and if we execute the movie the effect will be the same that had the movie, which we imported. This way we can already apply all the Clip properties to it.

As we see this movie "security mechanism" .swf isn't enough. If we create a movie and we distribute it, but we want to prevent that somebody modifies and redistributes it, in other words, to prevent that it's imported with Flash 8 by another user as we finished doing, this offers us the opportunity to protect the movie that we've created.

For it, we can edit, as we will see further on, the way of exporting our movies (look at the top image). So that to give an extra protection to our movies we must export the file like swf and activate in Options, the option Protect from Importing and to introduce a password. In this way this password will be asked to each one who tries to access our movie. If he doesn’t introduce this password, the movie will not be imported.

We can also export our clips and use them in programs like Swish, to take advantage of the Flash capacity for the graphical animation and the Swish text animation dominion. We can obtain this simply by exporting our clip like usual and giving to it always the format Flash 8 swf.

The fact of being able to combine the utilities of several programs is vital and Flash is specially good in this since it allows to interact of quite trustworthy way with treatment of images programs, vectorial drawing programs, videoplayers, etc.