Publishing and Exporting > Publishing and exporting overview

When you're ready to deliver your movie to an audience, you must publish or export the Flash FLA file to another format for playback.

The Flash Publish feature is designed for presenting animation on the Web. The Publish command creates the Flash Player (SWF) file and an HTML document that inserts your Flash Player file in a browser window.

The Export Movie command lets you create Flash content that can be edited in other applications and export a movie directly into a single format. For example, you can export an entire movie as a Flash Player file; as a series of bitmap images; as a single frame or image file; and as moving and still images in various formats, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, PICT, QuickTime, or AVI.

With the Publish command, you can do the following:

	Choose the formats in which you want the authoring file delivered and adjust any settings for the particular file format. Flash automatically publishes the authoring file in the selected formats, creates additional files based on the selected settings, and stores the settings with the movie file for reuse.
	The Export Movie options generally match those for publishing, but they do not save the settings for reuse.
	Create alternative file formats—GIF, JPEG, PNG, and QuickTime—and the HTML needed to display them in the browser window. Alternative formats enable a browser to display your movie's animation and interactivity for users who don't have the Flash Player installed.
	Create Generator templates to easily update content on a Web site, such as graphics and text, without having to replace files individually. For example, in Flash you can use Generator data as variables to provide immediate or customized feedback to visitors to your Flash Web site, make production of your Flash Web site more efficient, and create artwork, such as scrolling lists, that you can't create in Flash alone. See About Generator and Flash.

As an alternative to using the Publish command, if you're proficient in HTML, you can create your own HTML document with any HTML editor and include the tags required to display a Flash movie. See About HTML publishing templates.

If you have Macromedia Dreamweaver, you can add a Flash movie to your Web site easily. Dreamweaver generates all the needed HTML code. See your Dreamweaver documentation for more information.

Before you publish your movie, it's important to test how the movie works using the Test Movie and Test Scene commands. For more information, see Testing movie download performance.