building a slideshow with flash

The size of your Stage will determine the size of your Flash project when you embed it on a Web page. Figuring out what size to make your Flash project can be a tricky process, because this is something you generally don't want to set later, or else you may have to redo a lot of work. Generally, you want to mock-up your project in another program, like Photoshop, and then import the elements into Flash.

In our case, we will set the document size to the same size as the photos we will be using for the slide show; which is 400 pixels wide and 300 pixels high.

Setting the Stage size in Adobe Flash CS4

In Adobe Flash CS4, click on the Edit button in the Properties window under the Properties section. Remember, the properties window is contextual, so if you don't see this option, then click on the Stage first.

In the document properties window, set the Stage size to 400 x 300 pixels, and set the framerate to 15 frames-per-second.

The framerate is a value you that you can change at any time when creating your Flash project, and it won't affect anything your have already done in your project. The faster the framerate, the smoother and quicker animations will play. For our purposes, we found 15 to work well, but you can change this to 24 or 30 fps to see the differences in speed.

Setting the Stage size in Adobe Flash 8 or CS3

If you are using Adobe Flash CS3, the document properties are in a slightly different location. Click on the Stage size button in your Property Inspector bar at the bottom of your screen. Remember, you may have to click on the Stage first if this option is not present.

In the document properties, there are some additional fields. You can leave these blank for now. Filling these out would identify the Web page you embed your Flash project on in the last step; should you choose to let Flash create a Web page for you.

For this tutorial, set your stage size to 400 x 300, and the framerate to 15 fps.