Movieclip Reference Page

Important Things to Remember about Movieclips

A movieclip is a symbol which (generally speaking) resides in the library, with one or more instances of it on stage.

The content in a movieclip can be anything from a single shape in a single frame to multiple layers containing content (often including other movieclips) changing over many frames.

Additional important things to remember about movieclips:

• Every movieclip instance has its own timeline, its own playhead, and its own functions and variables.
• Every moviclip instance also has its own name, which may be assigned by you in the properties panel, or will be assigned by Flash otherwise. If you want to control a movieclip instance with actionscript, you need to give it an instance name.
• The main timeline of a Flash movie can also be treated as a movieclip instance (and controlled in the same way as a movieclip instance, with some exceptions). Its name is _root. It can also be accessed with the name _parent by a movieclip sitting in one of its frames.
  
  _root is an absolute address; it always refers to the main timeline of the movie. _parent is a relative address; it is a way of addressing a movieclip's containing movieclip (timeline), regardless of where they both fall in the overall hierarchy of movieclips in the movie. A relative address is always preferable because of its flexibility. Even if the published movie is subsequently loaded into a movieclip in another movie (eg, for preloading purposes), all relative (_parent-based) addresses remain valid, but _root is no longer the same.
• When a movieclip instance is encountered in the frame of a timeline (ie, when the playhead gets to a frame holding a movieclip instance), the movieclip's playhead will begin playing immediately and will continue to play unless told to do otherwise, or unless the playhead of the timeline it's in reaches a frame where the movieclip doesn't exist. Ideally, a movieclip is placed in a single frame of a timeline, or in a frame which has a stop action in it (in another layer named 'actions'). The stop action stops the main movie, but the playhead of the movieclip continues to play.
• A movieclip always runs at the same frame rate as the main timeline.

Movieclip Properties

Here is a list of properties of movieclips that you can alter with actionscript. You can see samples of how to set these properties with actions on a button in the chart here.