Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Killer Tips

Keep 'Em Fresh

The capability to import bitmaps, video, and sounds into your Flash document is a wonderful thing. However, imported media can complicate things when you're experimenting with your Flash movies. You may have a few bitmaps in place throughout your movie and want to turn them all to black and white images. Unfortunately there's no way to do this using Flash, and it would be a pain to have to re-import and reposition those bitmaps after changing them outside of Flash.

So here's what you do. Locate the bitmap asset in your Library and right-click it. Choose Update from the list of options. You'll see a final dialog enabling you to verify the update. Choosing OK here will tell Flash to update your asset with the latest version of the source file. This will only work if the original file is still in the same location. You will get "file not found" errors if you move the .fla file arouund, even if the asset file is in the same relative directory. Hey, nobody's perfect. Except me, of course.