Subtitles of the Movie

Movie clips are the most versatile, powerful and useful of Flash's symbol types. However their also the most difficult type of symbol to understand and use, understanding movie clip symbols is key to getting your Flash projects to an intermediate level. Movie clip symbols are so useful because they can contain multiple layers, graphic symbols, buttons symbols, and even other movie clip symbols as well as animation, sounds and ActionScripting. They really are the key to creating the type of dynamic and interesting Flash sites that are so common on the web now. So let me spend some time In this movie, reviewing this important concept of movie clips. Let me start with the definition, first term I need to define here is main timeline. This is the main timeline also labeled scene one in the interface. However Flash is not limited to only one scene, you can create additional scenes by choosing insert scene from the main menu. Notice that everything disappeared and this now says scene three, I actually have two scenes in this project before I added my third scene. I can navigate to these various scenes here in the edit scene button. So there's scene one you can see my content is back and then scene two and scene three are both empty. Flash will consider all scenes part of this main timeline and will add together the number of frames inside each scene to make up one main timeline. So for example notice that scene one only has one frame but if scene two had 10 and scene three had 20 I'd have a total of 10 plus 20 plus 1 or 31 frames in my main timeline. Now what's great about movie clips is that they operate independently of this main timeline. They can continue to play even if the main timeline has stopped and require only a single key frame on the main timeline to play. That's the example that I have here in scene one. I have only one frame in scene one, let's go ahead and show you this. I have a stop action right there so actually the play head is stopping although when I play this movie, by doing control test movie you'll notice that the hands can continue to move even though my main timeline is stopped. This is important when you start to work with ActionScript, you can think of movie clips as movies nested in the main timeline, unlike graphic symbols, button and movie clips symbols do not have a direct relationship to this main timeline. They are referred to as timeline independent since they can function, that is play animation sounds and so on regardless of how many frames in the main timeline. They are referred to as timeline independent since they can function which is play animation sounds and so on regardless of how many frames the main timeline contain. So, what I have here is a series of movie clips over here in my library, let me show you this independent timelines. If I double click on the hour hand movie clip, notice that I get another timeline up here, it's not scene one it's hour hand movie clip and this contains an animation that's the hour hand moving, rotating 360 degrees. I also have a minute hand movie clip, you can see that's also rotating 360 degrees, notice inside of my minute hand movie clip is another movie clip, the second hand movie clip. And that also contains an independent animation. Notice that the minute hand here is grayed out indicating that I'm currently editing the second hand. But their embedded movie clips, in other words the second hand is embedded inside the minute hand and I can always access these independent timelines by double clicking their movie clips here in the library. There's my minute hand going back there, so when I test this movie I start off with nothing moving but I can move each of these movie clips independently of the others, including stopping them. And I'm using ActionScript to do this, that's what I meant earlier when I stated that movie clips are particularly helpful when you start using ActionScript. So to summarize this ability to have different animations and actions occur independently of the main timeline this is what makes movie clips so useful and powerful.