Subtitles of the Movie

You may be familiar with mask layers already from previous versions of Flash. However in Flash MX you can now create animated masks by using a movie clip on a mask layer. You can also use action script to create an animated mask with a movie clip. Macromedia has included a sample file with every copy of Flash MX, which demonstrates this new capability; so let's take a look at it now. I'll start by bringing up the finder, which I have opened to the Macromedia Flash MX folder. On your computer you can generally find this in the program files, Macromedia Flash MX directory in your Windows or on a Macintosh in the applications folder. In this case I have it open, so let's double click on the samples folder. Notice that there are different types of folders that contain the different samples. Macromedia has included not only the swf file, which is the compiled version, but also the source code that you can take a look at later. We'll double click on the swf file and the sample we are looking for is scriptable mask. Here it is, we'll double click on that, Flash player will launch and notice that there are four buttons on the side. The first one is no mask, which is currently selected, and the second one is drag. Looking at the image you can see the image of the horse on the dais, let's go ahead and drag and we'll notice that we're dragging a mask layer. But as you can tell it's a movie clip because it is animated. We can drag it around the different sections of the screen and it continues to be animated. This is showing you the power of movie clips as mask layers. Let's look what else we can do. There's a complex button that will show us how you can have a more complex movie as a mask layer; notice the multi layers, the number of different animations that are taking place all as done through what they call the "complex layer". And finally this sample will show us what two masks will look like on two separate movie clips. This example shows you the power of the masking layers when used with movie clips. These are two different movie clips showing simultaneously on two separate mask layers. I personally think that the use of movie clips for mask layers is one of the more powerful features that they have come out with in this version of Flash and I encourage you to look into it if you have a need for this type of thing. As you can see using a movie clip in a mask layer can be quite powerful and the effects are literally endless as far as what you can create using this combination of movie clips and mask layers. 9.0] as far as what you can create using this combination of movie clips and mask layers.