Hi guys, this is probably a noob question but I'm just learning Flash in class
this semester. Anyway, my question is that I have a movie that is 300px X
250px and whenever I test my movie to see what I've done so far it's actually
showing content outside of the stage. It initially gives me a window with the
exact size of my movie, but on the bottom right corner it has that little
expandable window grab and when I click and drag I see all the content on my
movie that is in the work area. I hope I'm making sense but is this supposed
to be happening? Because I'm supposed to present the .swf file this Tuesday
but I'm not sure if my teacher will tell me that there's more content showing
than supposed to. Any solutions would be much appreciated!

nope, when published to an swf file, the only area that will be visible is that
which is the size of the Stage at 300x250 in your case. Unless you use
windowless transparent mode, in which case you would want to mask the area you
would like visible.

I don't know what's going wrong then. Let me give you an example, I have a
plane in the middle of the stage, and I'm using a really large image of a blue
sky and what I'm doing is i'm panning the image from left to right to give the
illusion of it flying. Going back to my issue, when i test the movie I can
actually see the entire image of the sky when I expand the window. I thought
it would only display what was passing through the stage. So anyway, this is
my actual problem. I should mention that I'm using CS3 and I put to use player
8 if that's anything to know.

Hi,
Actually, when you publish your SWF, it displays in the dimensions of your FLA
file, but if you expand the window or maximize it, areas outside the screen is
shown. However, if there is an object or animation that is off-screen, it will
appear in the ourside area of your movie that the maximizing reveals.
If you are going to publish your work for web, then it won`t be a problem,
since this expanding feature will not be exist, but if you are create your SWF
for desktop, you can add mask to only show your content or cover the off-screen
items with square on a higher layer(with the same color of your movie
background), it it is not shown in the expand case.