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Libraries

Libraries are used for storing symbols, which can be used to make the animation or program the movie. How you organize your libraries will effect workflow among groups of people in production. Even if you don't anticipate working with others on a file, it is helpful to have assets organized for future reference, when coming back to the project at a later date.

With Character animation, parts are usually named in various ways, all are an option: in relation to specific scenes (numerically or with initials), by body part type is the most useful, often with numbers after them, like rarm1, larm2 which can relate to animation instructions on an exposure sheet or from sketches.

SO NAME THINGS APPROPRIATELY!!!

Transferring from Library to Library
You can save a file as just a library, without scenes, which is useful, for example, for transferring files with parts to be colored. A file can be opened as a library to transfer in symbols into another file, for example, colored character parts into a programmed architecture.

Transferring library items many times across many files on different platforms (Mac/PC) can inevitably cause problems such as possible file corruption. (Macromedia). If this happens, you can attempt to copy and past all the frames of your movie into a new movie. Or try to copy the symbols in one at a time into your file, saving after each to discover if a particular symbol is corrupt and should be deleted. You will know it is corrupt when the machine crashes after that symbol is copied in.

An interesting library anomaly is the behavior of the library when you transfer symbols from one library to another if symbols are called the same thing. Sometimes when working you will transfer you file to another person, for coloring symbols, for example, and then you will transfer it back to your file. When you do, what you will see, if they have not changed the symbol names, that your symbols will not update when you transfer them in. To get around this problem you will have to rename your symbols in one library and then transfer them.

Shared Libraries
Shared Libraries are new to Flash 5. Shared libraries are swf files that are just symbols in the library (not on the stage) which are set to link to swf files that you will store with it on a server of the domain for your website. The Flash Bible recommends that you avoid using shared libraries if you are sharing a considerable amount of symbols of a large size. They are apparently unstable. But this is from back in Flash 5, things may be different now. This is not as useful as it may seem, because it cannot be used easily as a production tool unless you store parts that are being reused on a consistent web site location. This may be useful for episodic animation shows where many character parts are reused.

Shared library assets are set with the linkage property in the options pull down of the library window. It is recommended that you store assets in the same directory location and server, but you can point to another URL if necessary to share the library.