What are all the Windows for?

The stage

1.The Stage is like your drawing board – it’s where all the action happens. The size of the Stage defines the size of your final Flash movie. You can change the size of your movie by selecting Modify  Document. This launches the Document Properties.

2.You can also open this window by first clicking on the background of your Stage to select it and then by clicking on the size button in the Properties Inspector.

3.The Document Properties window controls the pixel dimensions of the Stage and, therefore, of the final movie. These dimensions are 550x400 pixels by default. The smallest size you can have is 1x1 pixels and the largest is 2880x2880 pixels.

4.Chapter 13 discusses several possible sizes for banner ads and whole web sites. It is good practice to set the size of your Stage right at the beginning of working on your document. If you resize the Stage towards the end of working on your document, you may have to re-position all your elements and this could be time consuming.

5.The background color of your document can be changed by clicking, holding and then sliding the mouse down from the background color swatch to select whichever color you choose.

6.The ruler units can be changed to measure in inches, points, centimeters and millimeters as well as pixels. It is advisable to keep this as pixels unless you are using Flash to create illustrations for print. Screen based work such as web sites and animation for video are measured in pixels.

7.If there is a size, background color and frame rate that you usually use – click on the default button so that you will automatically use these settings in future.