How to crop a Flash Movie

June 3, 2006 by Emanuele Feronato
Filed Under Flash, Tutorials • 22 Comments 

Sometimes we may need for some reason to “crop” a Flash Movie, but unlike Photoshop, there is not “crop” command.
How can we do?
Using the ’size’ button, set a new height and width for the flash movie based on your flash design.
At this point probably some of your movie images will be off of the stage… dont’ worry.
Unlock all layers.
Click the “Edit Multiple Frames” button, it’s is just below the flash timeline.
Now click the “Modify Onion Markers” button and select “onion all”.
This button is to the right of the “Edit Multiple Frames” button below the flash timeline.
At this point the onion marker above the flash timeline should be across all frames of the flash movie.
Now in the main flash movie menu choose “select all”, or use your mouse to select all the objects on the flash stage.
All the frames containing objects should appear selected.
Now you can move your entire flash movie to where you want it in the new stage size.
This will keep all of the animation and tweens and layers in proper sequence and order, just like if you cropped the movie

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22 Responses to “How to crop a Flash Movie”

  1. kiko on July 25th, 2007 2:12 pm

    Great tip dude!

  2. peter on November 10th, 2007 1:58 pm

    Worked perfectly! I can put my headache pills back in the cupboard!
    Thanks

  3. Peter Fusk on February 15th, 2008 4:10 pm

    Thanks so much for this. You’ve saved me a lot of time.

  4. Veronica on February 17th, 2008 5:54 pm

    Thanks so much, Emanuele! I thought I was going to have to spend the entire weekend redoing my animation. This worked perfectly!

  5. Anna on February 20th, 2008 2:13 am

    Hey…thanks so much. !!!! I have been looking for this EVERYWHERE! Was trying to isolate a navigation button and break it apart from main movie. This helped so much.

  6. One Flower Media on March 4th, 2008 8:13 am

    Great, easy to follow instructions. Thanks for the post!

  7. Dave on June 26th, 2008 4:04 pm

    You made my day. Why can’t Adobe make this an easy-to-find solution? Thanks for sharing it.

  8. Milos on August 19th, 2008 5:04 pm

    Cropping is cropping, what does it have to do with moving objects around?!

  9. Matt Lake on September 29th, 2008 1:39 pm

    WOW this has really helped in my page layouts and formatting.

    Matt

  10. naveen Joshi on October 22nd, 2008 10:58 am

    Thanks for the information. It is woeking perfectly.

    Regards,
    Naveen

  11. Valerie on November 12th, 2008 10:50 pm

    THANK YOU! You rock.

  12. jorge on December 3rd, 2008 9:02 am

    THANK YOU!!

  13. Giorgio on December 20th, 2008 5:10 pm

    Hi Emanuele,

    Actually this works if you have the .fla file. there is any way to crop a .swf?

    thanks!

  14. GŁÓWKA on March 4th, 2009 4:53 pm

    THANK YOU !!! VERY MUCH

  15. nox on March 24th, 2009 1:26 pm

    THANKS!

  16. neil on April 7th, 2009 4:27 pm

    lifesaver!

    thanks

  17. Ben on May 6th, 2009 7:00 pm

    AS a Flash newbie I was a bit miffed when I had created something and released it saved the whole stage.

    This tip saved me a LOT of time :)

    Cheers

  18. Jeremy Hewitt on July 7th, 2009 2:19 am

    GREAT tip! Was afraid it wasn’t going to work in Flash MX (what I have at work) – but it does!

    Note: Consider throwing some icons that show what the buttons you’re referring to look like. Took me a minute to figure them out by trial-and-error (for some reason my tooltips don’t always pop up).

    Thanks!

  19. dave on September 22nd, 2009 6:06 pm

    thankyou thankyou thankyou!!!
    I thought I was going to have to spend days re-working a project until I saw this

  20. jakob on December 1st, 2009 12:25 pm

    Thank you Emmanuel.
    I know a game graphics animation designer who really appreciates this – the edit M frames is so important..! thanks for pointing it out.

    Jakob, DK

  21. Russ on February 25th, 2010 8:05 pm

    This is how you can crop a flash stage, in case you just wanted to make a logo or something, smaller:

    1) Right click on the stage
    2) Select Document Properties
    3) Alter the stage size to suit.

    That’s it.

    Russ

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  1. Austen Conrad - blog.ARConrad.com » Blog Archive » Cropping flash movies for newbies on January 2nd, 2009 4:17 am

    [...] that I wanted to crop out, but couldn’t figure how in the world to do that until I ran into this helpful blog entry which gives a great explanation on how to move the contents of your movie without having to go [...]

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