MACROMEDIA FIREWORKS 8, Use Manual

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320 Chapter 13: Creating Animation
Exporting your animation
After you set up the symbols and frames that make up your animation, you are ready to export
the file as an animation. Before you export the files, you need to enter a few settings to make
your animation load more easily and play more smoothly. You can set playback settings like
looping and transparency and then use optimization to make your exported file smaller and
easier to download.
Setting the animation repetition
The Loop setting in the Frames panel determines how many times the animation repeats.
This feature loops frames over and over so you can minimize the number of frames needed to
build the animation.
To set the selected animation to repeat:
1.
Select Window > Frames to display the Frames panel.
2.
Click the GIF Animation Looping button at the bottom of the panel.
3.
Select the number of times to repeat the animation after the first time.
If you select 4, for example, the animation plays five times in all. Forever repeats the
animation continuously.
Setting transparency
As part of the optimization process, you can have one or more colors in an animated GIF be
displayed as transparent in a web browser. This is useful when you want a web page
background color or image to show through the animation.
To display a color as transparent in a web browser:
1.
Select Window > Optimize if the Optimize panel is not visible.
2.
From the Transparency pop-up menu in the Optimize panel, select either Index
Transparency or Alpha Transparency. For a description of these options, see
“Making areas
transparent” on page 344 .
3.
Use the transparency tools in the Optimize panel to select colors for transparency.
NO
TE
If you plan to import your animation into Macromedia Flash for further editing, you do not
need to export it. Flash can directly import Fireworks PNG source files. For more
information, see
“Working with Macromedia Flash” on page 392 .