About Depths

Click here to read a Macromedia tech note on Levels, layers and depth

Something to note that isn't mentioned in that tech note is that anything you actually draw on the stage is automatically given a depth - something like minus 16000.

Therefore you can pretty safely assume that anything you draw on stage will appear below (behind) any clips you create using duplicateMovieClip or attachMovie (or createEmptyMovieClip for example).

Have a look at the movie below.

The circle with a depth of -16375 is on the top layer in the movie. The circles with depth of -16379 and -16383 are on the same layer - bottom layer in movie. The depth of these could be swapped by clicking on one and choosing Modify/Arrange/Bring to front or send to back or whatever - you would have seen this sort of thing in Illustrator. The circle with a depth of 0 was created with attachMovie and placed on a depth of 0. The circle with a depth of -16380 was also created with attachMovie and as you can see, it goes behind the circle that is actually on the stage with a depth of -16375. Anyway this was just a little experiment - when you use attachMovie and duplicateMovieClip you should generally load your clips into positive depths - otherwise you risk removing important objects that you have placed on the stage (remember - you can only have one object in any one depth).

You can download this fla here.