What you can do with the Flash Asset Xtra

The Macromedia Flash Asset Xtra provides you with far more than just the ability to play a Shockwave Flash movie in a Director movie. Here are some of the most important features:

Insert Flash movies into the Director cast and use them as you would any other media type. The Flash movie plays with its full animation, sound, and interactivity in place.

Copy the entire Flash movie into the Director cast so it is always stored with the Director movie and immediately available. Or, add a Flash movie as a linked file. When Director encounters the Flash movie in the score, it will automatically load it into memory from disk, from a network drive, or from anywhere on the Internet. You can choose to load the file entirely into memory before displaying it or have it play immediately while Director continues to stream it into memory in the background.

Use Flash movies in either Director projectors or Director Shockwave movies. Flash movies are particularly effective in Shockwave movies because, as vector-based media, they are extremely small and therefore load much more quickly than most other media types.

Manipulate the Flash movie. Because Flash movies are vector-based, you can scale and rotate them while still maintaining their sharpness.

Create your Flash movies so they can communicate with your Director movie by sending events that Director scripts can capture and process.

Use a wide variety of Lingo extensions to control precisely the Flash movie's behavior and appearance. You can pause and play a movie, jump to specific frames, and precisely control the movie's scaling and rotation.

Create cross-platform projects. Director, Flash, and the Flash Asset Xtra all come in fully cross-platform Windows and Macintosh versions.

The possibilities are limitless. Here are just a few examples of what you can do:

Create "splash screens" for your Director Shockwave movies that load with lightning speed and entertain your users while the rest of your Director movie streams into memory.

Create interactive maps in Flash that users can pan across. Let them zoom in to reveal details with vector-based precision.

Use only one vector-based Flash cast member to provide exciting effects such as rotating an image — an effect that would take many versions of a bitmapped cast member to create.

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	Insert Flash movies into the Director cast and use them as you would any other media type. The Flash movie plays with its full animation, sound, and interactivity in place.
	Copy the entire Flash movie into the Director cast so it is always stored with the Director movie and immediately available. Or, add a Flash movie as a linked file. When Director encounters the Flash movie in the score, it will automatically load it into memory from disk, from a network drive, or from anywhere on the Internet. You can choose to load the file entirely into memory before displaying it or have it play immediately while Director continues to stream it into memory in the background.
	Use Flash movies in either Director projectors or Director Shockwave movies. Flash movies are particularly effective in Shockwave movies because, as vector-based media, they are extremely small and therefore load much more quickly than most other media types.
	Manipulate the Flash movie. Because Flash movies are vector-based, you can scale and rotate them while still maintaining their sharpness.
	Create your Flash movies so they can communicate with your Director movie by sending events that Director scripts can capture and process.
	Use a wide variety of Lingo extensions to control precisely the Flash movie's behavior and appearance. You can pause and play a movie, jump to specific frames, and precisely control the movie's scaling and rotation.
	Create cross-platform projects. Director, Flash, and the Flash Asset Xtra all come in fully cross-platform Windows and Macintosh versions.

	Create "splash screens" for your Director Shockwave movies that load with lightning speed and entertain your users while the rest of your Director movie streams into memory.
	Create interactive maps in Flash that users can pan across. Let them zoom in to reveal details with vector-based precision.
	Use only one vector-based Flash cast member to provide exciting effects such as rotating an image — an effect that would take many versions of a bitmapped cast member to create.