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TUTORIAL INFO |
Version: NA
Level: Beginner |
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| Putting
your SWiSH Movie on the Internet |
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Once
they have created their movie, most people will want to upload
it to the internet. This tutorial will take you through the
process step by step.
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| Step One
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Load up
your movie in SWiSH. For the purposes of this example, let us
say that your movie will be called 'welcome.swi'. You will notice
that the filename has extension '.swi' - this is so that SWiSH
can recognise what files were built by it, and what files weren't.
Because there is so much information in this movie, the filesize
is generally fairly large. The first thing to do is compress
the file to make it smaller, and thusly faster to view over
the internet.
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| Step Two
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Select File -> Export -> SWF from the main menu within
SWiSH. You will be prompted to name your exported file. It is
recommended that you leave the filename as the default option.
In our case this is 'welcome.swf'. Note the different file extension
'.swf'. This stands for 'Shockwave Flash' and indicates that
the file is now ready to be viewed over the internet. A swf
file holds all the information about how your movie looks, but
is stripped of the information which allows you to edit the
movie. This means that
a swf movie is smaller than a swi movie
a swf movie cannot be opened in SWiSH. To make changes,
you must edit the corresponding swi movie and then re-export
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| Step Three
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Now you
have a compressed file suitable for viewing over the internet.
Next you need some information to tell a person viewing your
webpage that you want to display the movie. This is done by
writing HTML code which loads and plays the movie when somebody
visits your website. Don't worry, SWiSH will do this for you.
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| Step Four
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Select
File -> Export -> HTML from the main menu within SWiSH.
Once again, you are prompted to name the file, and once again,
it is recommended that you leave the default filename, in our
case 'welcome.html'. If you are interested, you can view the
html code by opening the file in Notepad or a similar, simple
text editor. After a few lines at the top, you will see approximately
10 lines of code surrounded by <object> and </object>
tags - this is the code that calls your SWiSH movie. If you
look closely, in two places you will see the name of your swf
file being called - in our case 'welcome.swf'. The other tags
control background color and size of the movie, but we don't
have to worry about that now.
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| Step Five
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You should now have three files in a directory on your computer:
a .swi file (the 'master copy' of your movie)
a .swf file (the compressed copy of your movie)
a .html file (which loads the .swf file when somebody visits
your website)
Check to see that everything is working okay by double-clicking
the .html file. This should load a webpage and start playing
your movie. If it does not play, make sure that there is a .swf
movie in the same directory as the .html file, and make sure
that the .swf file name referred to in the html code is the
same as the filename of your exported .swf movie. If you have
left the defaults in the previous few steps, then these two
problems will not exist.
The third possibility is that your browser does not have the
'Flash Plugin' installed. This is the thing that reads your
.swf file and displays it on the screen. The Flash Plugin can
be found at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/
- it is free and takes about 5 minutes to install.
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| Step Six
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Now that
you have the .html and .swf files, you need to copy them onto
the internet. The first thing you need is a place to put them.
Most Internet Service Providers eg. AOL, give their users a
small amount of webspace for free. If you do not have this,
there are plenty of companies which offer free
webspace on the internet.
Unfortunately, we cannot offer instructions on how to upload
your movie to a particular website - please contact your web-provider
for this information.
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| Step Seven
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It is
vital that when you upload, the directory structure on your
website is the same as that on your computer. If you have left
the defaults as above, all this means is that you must copy
the .html and .swf files into the same directory on your website.
If you do not maintain the same directory structure, then the
html page will not be able to find and play the swf movie.
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| Step Eight
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If you
like, you can also change the name of your .html file to 'index.html'
or 'default.html'. This means that the page will be played automatically
when somebody visits your website, you don't have to point them
directly to the page. For example, instead of telling somebody
to visit 'www.swishzone.com/welcome.html' you can rename 'welcome.html'
to 'index.html' and then tell people to simply visit 'www.swishzone.com'.
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| Step Nine
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| And that's
it! Go to your web address and see if your movie plays. If it
doesn't, make sure that both the .html and .swf files have been
uploaded correctly, and that the html code points to the correct
place to find the .swf movie. |
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