A movie's final dimensions are defined by the
background size. Click on the background and the
"Properties" control is visible at the bottom
of the work area. . .
However, resizing the background does NOT affect
the objects on each layer! If the objects within your
animation are now larger than the background (or too
small), then you must select all objects on all layers
and resize them to fit. You may also need to adjust
their positions. Trying to do this "by hand" is a
nightmare.
Smith6x7 gave you a quick-n-dirty method which
is very handy for quick tests. The animation is exported
to SWF and the "File / Import to library" function is
used to load the SWF file into a blank Flash project.
You simply drag the SWF "movie clip" object from
the library to the background of the blank project.
Now you have a "movie within a movie". Then you
can easily resize or position the entire animation
as if it were a single Flash drawing object.
But I prefer to resize the original animation because
you can't edit the objects or layers within a movie
clip. It's also good to know how to reposition and
resize objects on multiple layers and across multiple
frames of an animation. You'll need to do it sooner
or later.
Resizing/Moving all objects within an animation is
pretty easy. I learned how to do it using the on-line
help file under the following topic. . .
"Using Flash > Creating Animation >
Editing animation > Moving an entire animation"
You can also search the help for "onion" and select
the " Moving an entire animation" topic. Why search
for "onion"? Because the "onion skin" tool is used to
resize or position objects across separate layers or
frames.
Finally, you can define the final film's size when you
use "File / Export movie" function. But I've found that
Flash doesn't have the best algorithms for resizing
graphics. If the output format is GIF, AVI, etc, then
shrinking the animation very much produces some
ugly pictures. I always try to keep the working-size
close to what the final output size will be.
