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Understanding the "Graphics" symbol

Anyone who already spent some quality time in ActionScript is no doubt fully aware what MovieClips do or how they work, however Flash also allows for creation of something very similar, the symbols called "Graphics". At first they might seem like a simplified versions of MovieClips, which is of course true but their existence relies on much simpler rule... during the exporting process all "Graphics" symbols are split into pieces, similar to how the "break apart" command (CLTR+B) does it, with only difference being that all properties and tweens are applied to objects within. From the ActionScript's perspective this gives us an interesting ways of optimization by removing excessively nested MovieClips.
For example lets take a scenario where we want two objects to be circling around each other and also at the same time both of them smoothly relocated to a new position:

So the Anim symbol contains the animation of two circling objects, while on the stage both of them are being moved to a new location. Nothing interesting here yet, but if we decide we want access to both of those objects from ActionScript instinctively the first step will be to switch Anim from "Graphics" into "MovieClip" and than followed by giving it an instance name so we can navigate through it to access the two objects we want. Which is exactly the nesting we can avoid by using the Graphics - of course if we know how they work.
I suggest experimenting with this by yourself, starting by creating two MovieClips on the stage with two different key-frames within them, then name them "mc1" and "mc2" (instance names, so you can access them from ActionScript) and finally enclose the whole thing inside a Graphics symbol. What will happen if we call the following script from the Stage's timeline?
mc1.gotoAndStop(1);
mc2.gotoAndStop(2);
Because the Graphics symbol will be broken apart with MovieClips "mc1" and "mc2" being thrown outside, the script will execute correctly.
A ready example for download: GraphExample.zip

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