loadmovie() headache

[scott]

Here's the problem, I want to load a movie from an external source into many different movies that appear at different times over a five minute timeline. If I would like to avoid the .swf been loaded in more than once is there any way to load the swf in the first frame (_visible = false) and copy it to the target movieclips? duplicate only works within the same timeline and attachMovie will only take from the library not the stage. Is there a workaround that anyone knows?

Thanks,
Scott

[Ruben]

Well, if you'd just load the movie into one movieclip and later another time into another movieclip then the second time the clip will already be in the temp.internetfiles and will immediately (don't give me **** over a split second :p) be displayed in the movieclip...

right? - Ruben

[Xeef]

Ruben is right

but sometime it's nesesary to be abel to copy it if folow the link :
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Tips_And_Techniques/How_to_u-FreshLau-1000/more2.php

[scott]

Marvelous, your advice is dead right but perhaps I should explain...

I am converting TV animations into swfs for CD ROM where one character will be created by a UI and wrapped in a swf for inclusion in the animation. Of course the animation has loads of nested clips at various levels and when loading in the split second delay creates a flash between looped clips and when the character reappears. the one library item "placeholder" has hundreds of instances in the various clips.

Plan A would be to bring the character out into one level the full length of the animation and set _visible to true or false when he appears or disappears but I wanna see if this is avoidable as its alot of extra work.
That tutorial seams like the perfect solution but the external swf would need to be specially prepared. and in my case the swf will be a .png inserted into a swf wrapper to appear in the animation.

If there was any way of converting Flash MX files to flash 5 I could maybe make a .swt template and change the graphic that way?!
As you can see Im mighty confused and would welcome any ideas or thoughts.

Cheers

[scott]

All fixed, finally got it working with one swf containing a character exported for runtime sharing and the main animation importing the character for runtime sharing.
The application makes a new character and using swftools inserts it into the first swf. and by golly it gets imported into the main swf. good, and can be attached at will with no flashing reload time.
Im off to do something more useful