Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows & Macintosh

16. Delivering Movies to Your Audience

When you finish creating graphics, animation, and interactivity in Macromedia Flash 8, it's time to deliver the goods to your audience. You must export the Flash document to another format for playback. You have several formats to choose among. The one that guarantees viewers will see all your animations and take part in all your movie's interactivity is the Flash Player format. Player files end with the extension .swf.

When you install Flash 8, you can also install version 8 of the Flash Player application. You can view SWF files running directly in Flash Player on your computer. Other programs, such as Web browsers, can also control Flash Player.

You can export movies as a series of images in either bitmap format (GIF or PNG files, for example) or vector format (such as Adobe Illustrator files). Another option for movie delivery is a self-playing file called a projector. Users double-click the projector file to open and play the movie. And you can print your entire movie or individual frames, should you want to give someone a hard-copy version of the movie (for storyboarding, for example).