Flash Tip: Exporting a Preview

With a work-in-progress, it's always good to be able to stop and check how the overall project is coming along--especially in Flash, where scrubbing your timeline won't always give you a realtime preview of your animation or interactive functions, and movie clips won't play unless they're in the export format.

While you can always do a final publish of your Flash project, sometimes it's easier to just publish a preview, which renders a bit faster and opens right there in your Macromedia Flash project window. You can publish a preview by going to File->Publish Previw, or by pressing F12(PC or Mac) on your keyboard.

You can set Flash to publish both previews and final renders in just one or any number of multiple formats:

• Flash SWF;
• HTML(.htm format with an SWF embedded);
• GIF;
• JPEG;
• PNG;
• Windows Projector(.exe executable file that will play in Windows);
• Macintosh Projector(.hqx executable file that will play in Mac OS);
• QuickTime Movie(.mov), and
• Windows Media Format (.avi or .wmv, only available with certain versions of Flash or certain plug-ins)

If you use the shortcut key, Flash will publish in the first format listed out of multiple formats; however, if you click on File->Publish Preview and have multiple formats specified, you can select the format that you wish to preview.

You can control your publishing and preview settings by going to File->Publish Settings or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F12(PC) or Option+Shift+F12(Mac) on your keyboard. The first tab on the Publish Settings dialogue lets you set which formats you publish and preview in, by checking or unchecking the boxes next to the format name. It also lets you see the filename that will be exported plus the extension; if you leave "default" checked, then it will automatically name the exported file after the name of your .fla project. If you uncheck "default" you can enter your own file name.

As you check or uncheck formats you'll see additional tabs appearing or disappearing at the top of the dialogue; each format has its own panel of settings, and by clicking on the tab associated with a format you can define certain export settings such as size, compression, color depth, etc.