[rusty]

Ok, here's the poop. I've read Phillip Kerman's Teach yourself Flash MX in 24 hours. Most, ok nearly most of the book I understood. There were several exercises that I completed but had the most difficulty with scripting. I want to design a site for myself. I'm a photographer who really is kind of anal about letting other's do work for me. These are my dilemmas:
1) I plan on designing 3-4 animations that have photographs fade in and out and that are linked with music (MP3). Should I design one long timeline with preloaders between the animations? Or, do I create all movies seperately in a single folder? Also, I plan on having a seperate portfolio page with photographs accessible through thumbnails or again having them automatically fade in and out. Does this go in my orginal timeline? Does every subsection go in the main timeline with "goto" buttons.

2) What framerate is best to start with? I was planning on starting with 24fps. Incidently, my intro page will have a html link to my old site as well as a link to my flash site for high speed users.

3) All important! I always like the option of changing photographs in the future. What is the best way to plan my site so that this will not be a huge problem.

Any help from anyone with ideas or advice would be most appreciated
Thanks in advance (the more the better)
Rusty

[Scottae]

Hello rusty and welcome to Flash Move.[list=1][*] You ideally want to keep things in nice little bit size pieces. If you put everything in one movie (mp3's, large images, etc.) it becomes more than most people (bandwidth wise) can swallow. So I'd say make each animation a separate movies. With the photo gallery, have your main movie load the jpg images in (i.e. use loadMovie(); ). Subsections can be navigated to by the method you described (goto). That might be the easiest way initially.[*] 24 fps is good. [*] Set up your site so that it uses an external text file to pull information from. XML is really the way to go with stuff like this. Once your Flash is set up to pull info from the xml file, then to update the Flash, you only have to update the xml which can be done on Notepad. You could also use server side scripting with data bases, but that is another ball game all together.[/list=1]

[Scottae]

Here's an example image gallery. Check out the last few posts and there's an example attachment

http://www.flashmove.com/forum/showt...llery+OR+image

[rusty]

Thanks , Ok so if I want to have 3-4 movies, do I just keep them in a folder with different instances? Or, can I have 1 long movie with everything in it and have a preloader for every section that has been clicked. then have a stop action at the end of the animation. Will that work? Please help with anything you guys can
Thanks again
Russ

[rusty]

BTW, what is XML.
Rusty