flash actionscript: [quoted text, click to view]

Sounds like a job for a guide layer. When you make a layer a guide
layer you can put a picture or drawing or whatever in there that shows
you where things go. Then when you publish the swf file, that guide
layer stuff is not exported with the swf. It's just for your
reference while you work on the file.
Guide layers can be real important if you use a lot of movieclips in a
layout.
tralfaz

I have an external .swf that I load at a certain frame. It doesn't have any
animation added to it. It's basically a screenshot of a software app. I'm
loading and unloading to save on space since these screenshots jack up the file
size . This is working great, however, what I'm looking to do is once the
movie(screenshot) is loaded, I need to add additional animation such as mouse
movements and clicks, etc. over the ss.

The problem is that you do not see the loaded movie at design time, only at
runtime. Therefore, I cannot accurately place callouts or mouseclicks.

I can solve the problem by adding these effects to the loaded movie's file,
then loadMovie it, but I'm trying to find an alternative to doing it this way.
I'd like to have all of the animation in one file and just loadmovies all day.

Any help?

You could apply all your effects/events to a container clip, even keyframe
animation, then load the swf into the container. So you have:

container_mc.loadMovie_mc

you animate ect. container_mc, but you loadMovie() into
container_mc.loadMovie_mc