Flash components and developement

Hi guys, I have several questions in which are not quite answered in my searches. I am a web designer for a marketing firm. Recently I was asked to create a flash animation for one of our departments. As it turned out, they liked it too much. They are taking it to a show, but now they are having all of the departments use it. I am the only one in the company that has intermediate knowledge of flash.

Anyways, with this animation and all the departments that will be using it as a standard, each will want to have changes according to the department. Unfortunately, the way the animation is set up, it would require me to basically re-animate each frame because some frames are using distort or shaping. Then most of the rest is simply swaping instances of videos and other images, though they might want to add more videos to the original which in turn would force me to make yet another animation to compensate for the new videos.

My supervisor is now also asking me to find an easier way to maintain the animation for other future changes and uses. Basically, my first question is where can I find info and tutorials on creating components and so forth, programming my flash file to simply switch instances of images with same positioning, shapes, and size. This also goes with adding videos and new animations just to maintain it, like drag and drop using containers or something.

I’ve seen a source file of JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER. He seems to use containers. Where can I find info on how to create them, and program them to do what it needs? If successful, I can foresee the company asking me to do the same with our latest main web product so they can save money from using a third party tool.

My second question is not so technical as developement. I’ve been trying to export my movie to .avi and .mov but neither works. I use CS3, and the only possible explanation I can think of in why they don’t work is because I only have one frame in the scene. I’m using movie clips in the main scene. I’ve tried third party tools for swf to video conversions, but most lose quality in both image and animation. The best I’ve found was Sothink’s swf to video encoder. But is there another way around using 3rd party tools for file conversion or export? I’ve tried screen capturing tools as well, but I get the same poor quality, even after I try to improve the quality back by another conversion.

Sorry for the long stories, just makeing sure there’s enough information there to understand what I’m talking about and so forth. Anyway, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time in reading. I look forward to hearing some answers.

Jakes