When you open the Flash CS6 program, you are greeted with the Welcome screen where you have several options including starting a new project. We discussed the Welcome screen in a previous tutorial. Now that we are ready to start our first Flash^R project, let's take a look at how to set up your Flash document.

Open Flash CS6. From the Create New list of options in the Welcome screen, you have several choices. The types of new document you choose depends on the purpose of your project.

ActionScript 3.0 - The most universal type of Flash project. ActionScript 3.0 is the most recent version of ActionScript which is the Flash programming language. Even if you don't plan to write any ActionScript for your project, you will still start with this option.

ActionScript 2.0 - Older version of Flash ActionScript which you might encounter in vintage Flash projects.

AIR, AIR for Android and AIR of iOS - Use for mobile projects.

Let's walk through starting a new project.

1. From the Welcome screen, click ActionScript 3.0 from the Create New list.
   
   This will give us a Flash file with the default settings. Our first step is to change these settings for our needs.
   
   
2. From the Menubar, click Modify - Document to open the Document Settings dialog box.
   
   Our project will be an ecard that will play on a website via the common Flash Player. As you can see, the default settings are 550 pixels by 400 pixels and a Frame Rate of 24 fps. Let's make our ecard a little larger. We will use the low resolution dimensions of the iPad, which seems to be a popular size for ecards at this time.
   
   
3. Set the Width to 1024 pixels and the Height to 768 pixels.
   
   
4. The default Frames per Second rate is 24. We will have a smoother animation if we increase this setting to 30 fps.
   
   In most projects, the first layer in the Timeline will cover the background of the stage but in some instances you may wish to set the background color for your needs.
   
   
5. You can click on the color box to open the Color Picker. Click on a color swatch to set the background color to your choice.
   
   As you can see, the ruler units is set to Pixels. This is the measurement most commonly used for web based projects. Let's keep this default setting.
   
   The Auto-Save feature is a recent addition to Flash. Depending on your workflow, you may wish to turn on this feature.
   
   Finally, you have the option to click the Make Default button to tell Flash to use these settings for all your projects going forward.
   
   
6. Click OK to accept these new document settings.
   
   

Once the project loads into the Flash workspace, you will see that the size of the stage has been enlarged to match our new settings. You can change these settings at anytime by clicking Modify - Document from the Menubar or in the Properties panel.

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