Flash Animation 12: Exporting Your Animation as a Movie File

This is going to be quick and simple, just a basic base that I wanted to cover before we move on to more complex animation and ActionScripting. While exporting your animation as a movie file isn't a viable option if you want to preserve user interaction, it can work well if you have a point-A-to-point-B animation of any length that requires no user interaction other than to play, pause, or stop--and it requires less effort to embed a movie file in a web page, or make it available for viewing or download by those who don't have the Flash player. It also has a better chance of making sure that your audio stays in synch with your animation, as with looping audio in Flash all it takes is a one-frame drop at the end of an animation to make the audio slowly fall out of synch over the course of multiple repetitions (one example of this is the addictively famous "Badger Badger Mushroom" animation). We'll just reuse the animation we've been building over previous lessons, only with a loss of interactivity, to demonstrate the technique.