Lesson 12.3 Publishing Your Movie
You created and optimized your movie and are now ready to show it to the world. There are several formats for outputting your Flash movie. In this part of the lesson, we are going to learn about embedding the Flash movie (.swf) into an .html file or web page. We are also going to learn to publish as a self-running executable file called a Projector (.exe for PC, .hqx for MAC).
Flash makes publishing fairly simple for us through use of the Publish Settings Window. To access the Publish Settings Window, go to the File Menu - File>Publish Settings.
The default view will present 3 tabs: Formats, Flash, and HTML. The Formats tab will be in front and have Flash and HTML checkboxes selected by default if you haven't changed the settings like I have in the illustration below. The tabs will change depending on what checkboxes you select for the format type:
You can see all the output formats listed in the Type: list of the Formats tab. Select Flash (.swf) and HTML (.html) if not already selected. Select and review both Flash tab and the HTML tab to view the options associated with each of these formats.
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The Flash tab offers options for presentation of the .swf file. Leave the Load Order to Bottom up. In Options, check the Generate size report. I recommend setting all your image and sound properties directly in the library individually rather than using these global settings. The Version enables you to select from Flash 1 through Flash 6. Not all your viewers may have upgraded to the most current Flash Player. Those with older players may be able to view Flash 3 and/or 4 movies but not Flash MX. You have the option to save your movie in a lower version. However, Macromedia makes it very easy to download the most current Flash Player for free. It's effective to put a link to the Flash Player download site and a small text informing the user to get the latest player to view your movie. You can also get the Flash deployment kit which will work on a majority of browsers (not all...) to do a sniff for your browser Flash player and automatically direct you and/or download the most current version depending on your OS and browser. The best FDK is available on Colin Moock's site, http://www.moock.org.
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The HTML tab offers options for how your Flash .swf file will play embedded in the browser. Accept the default Template option.
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There is one setting in the HTML tab which may require you to spend some time experimenting. This is the Dimension: option. Here you can choose Match Movie, Pixels, or Percent. This is tricky and our textbook has a short lesson illustrating the benefits and disadvantages of each. Basically, Match Movie will keep the movie at the size you set in the Movie Properties. The default Flash movie is 550 x 400 pixels. If you resize your browser to be smaller than those dimensions, parts of your movie will be cut out. If you select Pixels, you will have problems on viewers using different screen resolutions. To prevent this, you can set the Dimensions to Percent. Percent is in relation to the browser window. So, 100% will fill the entire browser window no matter how you resize the window. This sounds good but the movie may not maintain its proper proportions if you resize the window. The book says:
Playback options are pretty self-explanatory. You have the option to have the movie pause at start which will require user input such as a button click to start the movie.
Display Menu refers to the menu that appears when the user right-clicks your movie.
Loop will keep the movie running continuously unless you have a stop action in your script.
Device Font is for Windows users and we discussed this in the optimizing lesson. Accept the defaults for all remaining options on the HTML tab.
Return to the Formats tab. You'll notice that to the left of the Type column is the Filename Column. The names should be visible but dimmed out. Below the filename list is a check box saying:
Use default names. If you select this option, Flash will use the name you selected for your .fla file for the .swf and .html file. If you deselect this option, you can name the files whatever you want. Either way when you hit the publish button, Flash will create the files and place them in the same directory as your .fla file.
To publish your .fla file, you can go to either Publish Preview or Publish on the File Menu. Publish Preview offers you a selection of Flash (the .swf file) or HTML (the .swf file in a browser). Selecting the Publish Preview publishes and shows you your published work while the Publish setting publishes it but does not display the published files to you at this time. The published .swf and .html files (and/or whatever other files you selected from publish settings) will be created and put in the same folder as your .fla file.
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If you generate a size report in the Flash tab, you'll find a .txt text file with the same name as your .fla name in the same directory as well. If you don't want to publish at this moment, you can click the OK button and return to your .fla file. These settings are now set and will remain set unless you go back and change them. You can close and reopen your .fla movie and the settings will remain. Each movie retains its unique settings.
When you are ready to publish, go to the File Menu - File>Publish. To preview the published files, go to the File Menu - File>Publish Preview and select the html or Flash preview. If you select html, your primary browser will launch displaying the embedded Flash .swf file. If you select the Flash preview, the Flash Player will launch displaying the .swf in the player window.
Now that you've published your movie you'll want to upload the files to your website for all your audience to view. The only files to upload are the .swf file and the .html file. Don't upload the .fla file. Keep the .fla file on your hard drive and/or back up on removable media in a safe place in case you need to edit it. You cannot reopen and edit a .swf file. Once you publish your .fla file, the layers are flattened and the timelines from all movie clips and scenes become one long timeline on one layer. You can edit your original .fla file only...so don't lose it! Keep it in a safe place or two!
NOTE: When you use the Control or Command + Enter or Return, you are creating a .swf file in the Flash Testing Environment. You may see objects that are outside the stage area when you test on a Windows machine. Once you publish the file and embed the .swf in .html, the .html file controls how the plugin player will display the movie. You will only see the objects within the defined dimensions of your stage no matter if you have used Match Movie or scaled to a percentage.
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FTP to Your Web Hosting Server
You'll need to contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to get information in order to FTP to your server space. These instructions may be different from host to host. You will need an FTP client (file transfer protocol) in order to transfer the files to the assigned location. There are several FTP clients associated with different operating systems and software programs. Do a search on the net and download a trial version of an FTP client such as WS-ftp, Cute-ftp for windows, or Fetch for Mac.
Once you've uploaded and know the location of your web page with embedded .swf file, you can share the URL so others can see your Flash movie live on the web. Hooray, almost done.
The last thing we want to do is create a self-running presentation of our Flash movie. This will enable you to email your Flash movie, burn it onto a CD, and send it to people who may want to view offline, or create a screensaver from the Flash file.
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Creating a Projector
Open the Publish Settings Window. From the Formats tab, notice that there are two Projectors listed. One is Windows Projector (.exe) and the other is Macintosh Projector. Projectors are platform specific. You can create both on either platform but you can only play a Windows Projector in Windows OS and you can only play a Mac projector on a Mac. You can create a hybrid CD and include both projectors on the CD.
When you select Projector from the Formats tab and click Publish. Flash publishes the projector file in the same directory as your .fla file with a pink diamond shaped icon surrounding the white Flash logo. You can double click on the icon to launch your projector.
Windows Projectors are saved with an .exe extension. Macs are .hqx which is a compressed file requiring the user to have decompression software to unstuff it. (Aladdin Stuffit Expander or Binhex).
A Projector is a self-running application that bundles the Flash Player into the application so the viewer does not have to have a copy of Flash to view the movie. Projector files are self-contained and if you look at the file size of your projector compared to the file size of the .swf file, you'll see that the projector is much larger. This is because Flash has to add some additional Flash resources to make the projector self-running. You can search the web for screen saver programs and create a screen saver from your Flash projector.
This is the last lesson in this course. Please proceed to the Assignments area.
Up » 12.1 Optimizing Your Movie » 12.2 Preloaders » 12.3 Publishing Your Movie
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