Question: Why Don't My Movie Clips Play When I Publish Animated GIFs from Flash?
So you've got this amazing Flash animation with nested layers of movie clip animations. For some reason you need a GIF version of it--but when you publish as a GIF, all of your beautiful movie clips aren't moving. Why is that?
Answer: Because when Flash renders a GIF, it uses the main timeline. Movie clips have their own timelines, and if Flash tried to create a GIF that cycled both the main timeline and every movie clip's timeline to the end, you'd end up with a 50GB 256-color mess. So Flash just treats the movie clips like static symbols and exports the first frame as part of the landscape of the main timeline.
