Flash

Exporting Shockwave

Inserting Key Frames | Exporting Shockwave | Going Further

How can we have the animation that we have just made play on a Web page? This can be accomplished in a simple two step process: first export the movie in Shockwave format, and then use a special HTML tag to embed the Shockwave movie in a Web page.

There are actually several ways to have Flash save your animation in Shockwave format. If you tested your animation in the last section by choosing "Control > Test Movie", you've already created a Shockwave version of your animation. (The Shockwave file was automatically named by Flash. For instance, if you'd earlier saved your work in the file example.fla, the Control > Test Movie step will have created a Shockwave file named example.swf. The swf extension indicates the file is in the Shockwave format.)

You can also export your movie as Shockwave by selecting "File > Export Movie" from the main menu. This option lets you choose your own name, and lets you set some additional properties, for the Shockwave file.

Now use the mouse to copy the following EMBED command:

<embed name=test src=example.swf width=550
height=400 play=true quality=high></embed>

Then open your HTML file and paste the command in the HTML file at the point where you want the movie to appear.

The above command assumes that "example.swf" is the name that you gave to the movie when you saved it as a Shockwave file, and we assume that this file is in the same directory as the HTML file (otherwise you must specify the complete path from the HTML file to the Shockwave file). If you open this HTML file in a browser equipped with the Shockwave plugin, you should see your animation in motion. If you do not see it, you may not have a current enough Flash plugin installed for this browser. (You may get the latest version of the Flash player here.)