Transparency in PS CS to FLASH

Hi all,

I’m currently creating a final project for a Maya 6 class and to make it more interactive I am going to combine it in Flash MX 2004 to use it to call movie clips and make a character I am modeling animate.

Anyways, I plan to have a scene where the screen is a desktop on a cpu and the character will appear on the desktop. The icons will be selectable to open up mock programs. I have made a mock desktop in PS and have imported some free OSX icons off of deviantArt using axilias to keep the transparency.

My question is should I use the image I made in PS icons and all as a background with invisible buttons over the icons or should I save all the icons individually and make buttons out of them once I import them to my fla?

-If individual then what is the best way to keep the nice gray transparency shadow? PNG is my best guess.

Thanks for responses and I will see if I can begin posting some sketeches and progress. I doubt it will be able to be but on a site because I estimate it will be relativley large. :cons: