Chapter 11: Working With Movie Clips - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-LEARNING ACTIONSCRIPT 2.0 IN FLASH Manual

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CHAPTER 11
Working with Movie Clips
Movie clips are like self-contained SWF files that run independently of each other and the
timeline that contains them. For example, if the main timeline has only one frame and a
movie clip in that frame has ten frames, each frame in the movie clip plays when you play the
main SWF file. A movie clip can, in turn, contain other movie clips, or nested clips. Movie
clips nested in this way have a hierarchical relationship, where the parent clip contains one or
more child clips.
You can name movie clip instances to uniquely identify them as objects that can be controlled
with ActionScript. When you give a movie clip instance an instance name, the instance name
identifies it as an object of the MovieClip class type. You use the properties and methods of
the MovieClip class to control the appearance and behavior of movie clips at runtime.
You can think of movie clips as autonomous objects that can respond to events, send messages
to other movie clip objects, maintain their state, and manage their child clips. In this way,
movie clips provide the foundation of component-based architecture in Macromedia Flash Basic
8 and Macromedia Flash Professional 8. In fact, the components available in the Components
panel (Window > Components) are sophisticated movie clips that are designed and
programmed to look and behave in certain ways.
For information on using the Drawing API (drawing methods of the MovieClip class), filters,
blends, scripted animation and more, see Chapter 13, "Animation, Filters, and Drawings."
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