Resizing Flash Movies

[pmburrow]

I have a question about resizing a flash move. Currently on our site, I have a 245X400 flash movie advertising our Connecting Points groups. I am in the process of building a new site where this ad will need to become apx.150X300 pixels.

Is there a quick and easy way of resizing a flash movie, or do they have to be rebuilt?

Phillip

www.Discoveryumc.org (http://www.discoveryumc.org/)

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Phillip,

A simple way would be to change the width and height dimensions for the .swf file in the underlying HTML code. (But because you should be using an embed tag enclosed by an object tag, you actually have to change the dimensions twice.)

But I'm not sure that's really a good idea.

Moreover, there's an another issue involved with your situation. That is that the "before" and "after" movies don't have the same width-to-depth ratios. When resized in proportion, the 245x400 pixel movie will be 150x245 pixels, or, if you prefer, 184x300 pixels.

So it seems like you need to resize the original .fla movie. Which is a bit tricky.

The original .fla movie itself can be resized by changing its dimension in the Modify => Document menu (but no doubt you know that). If only it were truly that easy.

The bad news is that, at least in Flash MX (I don't have MX 2004), the dimensions are anchored at the top left corner. That means increasing or decreasing the depth of the movie results in changes only to the bottom of the movie. Similarly, changes to the width of the movie result in changes only to the right side of the movie. This is contrary to what happens in Photoshop or ImageReady, where, if you change the size of the document, you get to choose which side(s) are altered.

I mention this because, in my limited experience with trying to resize a Flash movie, this fact of life can be frustrating, especially if you happen to want to add space to the left or top of the movie.

In Photoshop or ImageReady (or any page layout program), you can Select All and move all elements around to reposition them en masse. That doesn't work in Flash, because Flash is keyframe-based.

So let's say a person didn't plan well (when creating a Flash movie) and realized after much work that he or she needed to have more space at the top and/or left side of the movie. They can change the movie's dimension in the Modify => Document menu, as stated, but that leaves all the elements in the top left as before. To move all elements down and to the right, the person would have to be sure to repeat the operation of selecting all elements on a given layer and moving the elements an equal amount, at each and every keyframe. Otherwise, unintended animation results.

I looked at your website, but I don't know that I saw the Flash movie you're talking about. So I don't know if you have lots of elements and keyframes in your movie (such a movie would be a challenge to resize), or not.

Probably the best plan would be to make the movie the final dimension it needs to be (150 x 300) and do the hard work of resizing and moving things. (But work with a copy so that you still have the original, larger movie.)

Now, having said all that, check out this tutorial:

http://www.tinkertech.net/tutor/resizeflash/

especially the paragraph that states:

<< Another common mistake that is made is that movies are built in Scene 1 or the main movie timeline. If you start creating your animation as soon as you launch Flash the animation will be built in the main timeline, which is called Scene 1 (this is the default). Creating an animation in the movie's main timeline makes resizing the movie at a later date difficult. Instead animations should be created in Movie Clip Symbols. >>

On this page of my site:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/marketing_progress.php

I have a Flash-based graph that is growing too wide. I tried to modify it so one could move the graph (of number of visitors to my site) left and right, but it didn't seem possible. It appears that I should have followed the technique described in the quoted matter above.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Website

[pmburrow]

Thanks David.

I am still learning flash, and I was hoping that I was missing something. The article that you referenced is interesting. I scanned thru it this morning and I plan to read it again later.

Presently, our site is a two-column site. The one that I?m working on will have three columns. Therefore, the ad is going to have to shrink down to fit inside the smaller width column.

Currently the flash movie is located at the very bottom on the left hand side of the front page. It isn?t that complicated. I?ve played with it long enough that I could have already rebuilt it. In fact I?ve already started. The main reason I wanted to find a way to resize it is to save time with future projects. I also have other plans that will be using this medium in our new site. That seems to be one draw back with working with flash, it?s hard to change your plans later.

Phillip

www.discoveryumc.org (http://www.discoveryumc.org/)

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Phillip,

<< That seems to be one draw back with working with flash, it?s hard to change your plans later. >>

Yes, I agree.

I can see now the Flash movie you're talking about. Doesn't seem like it will be too hard for you to resize the movie.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[pmburrow]

David,



No, it want be too hard to rebuild this particular movie. However, the point was to learn how to keep from having to waste time doing so. As I mentioned earlier, I expect to have some other projects in the future. I can just see having to rebuild several movies.



Thanks anyway, I appreciate your comments. This time I?m choosing to rebuild it the movie using the ?screens? feature in Flash 2004 Professional. The last time I used the ?time line? feature. This will at least be an opportunity to learn something new.



Phillip

www.discoveryumc.org (http://www.discoveryumc.org/)

[David Gillaspey]

I have a Flash-based graph that is growing too wide.
I've fixed this now. You can see the results here:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/marketing_progress.php

In order to do this, I had to make the graph its on Movie Clip symbol, as suggested in previous posts.

I started with a new Flash movie the same size as the original. Then I created a new (but blank) Movie Clip symbol. First I tried importing into this movie symbol a .swf exported from the original movie. (Note that for a .swf to be importable at all, the setting "Protect from import" in Publish Settings in the original .fla movie must be unchecked.) Unfortunately, importing a .swf into Flash causes all layers from the original .fla movie to be collapsed into one layer. Also I saw font problems.

So that didn't work.

However -- and this should have been obvious to me -- in Flash you can copy and paste a layer or even range of cells (including more than one layer), and all their content, from one timeline to another. This kind of operation is similar to pasting a range of cells in Excel from one location to another: Just as Excel is really picky about letting you complete the paste operation, so is Flash.

I then dragged this movie symbol (with the graph's elements copied from the original movie into the movie symbol's timeline) onto the main timeline, and worked out the buttons and ActionScripting needed to move the graph back and forth, left and right. (I'll spare you the details.)

I saw, however, that not ALL the graph should be in the Movie Clip symbol. Some parts of the graph -- the title, and the legend and tic marks on the left -- are static, that is, they need to stay put while the rest of the graph moves back and forth. So those parts of the graph I moved to the main timeline.

It's not a completely happy story, however. In Flash's main timeline, the "0 point" for the X and Y coordinates is at the top left corner. That makes moving and positioning elements in the main timeline easy and intuitive for me, because other programs I've used such as Quark Xpress (layout program) work the same way.

However, in my Movie Clip symbol, the "0 point" for the X and Y coordinates is way below all the elements, and I don't know how to fix this. So my vertical bars (showing number of visitors) all have a Y coordinate of between -100 and -200. When I need to move these bars up and down, it's hard for me to figure out what the new "Y" coordinate should be. If I need to move a bar up by 10 pixels (I'm leaving out a lot of context here), it's hard to know if I should add 10 to, or subtract 10 from, the current Y coordinate. It's not intuitive for me anymore, therefore. So I miss the simple X and Y coordinate system of the main timeline.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites