Flash 8 Cookbook

4.13. Copying Animations

Problem

You want to copy an animation, or content in contiguous layers and/or frames, to a different timeline.

Solution

Use Edit → Copy Frames.

Discussion

Like most applications, Flash enables you to copy the contents of your files and paste them into other documents or other parts of the same document. The Clipboard works for copying individual elements, but copying a timeline segment is not an individual element. For example, imagine you’ve created an animation on the main timeline and realize that you need to move that animation into a movie clip. The standard Copy and Paste commands won’t work.

Fortunately, Flash has commands that enable you to copy and paste frames, including spans of contiguous frames across layers. To use it, drag to select the frames you want to copy in the timeline, and choose Edit → Copy Frames.

Tip

To facilitate dragging to select frames in the timeline, be sure that Edit → Preferences → General → Span Based Selection is toggled off.

Open the destination timeline, which may be that of a symbol, or the main timeline of a different file. Select at least one frame, and choose Edit → Paste Frames. Flash pastes the frames, following these rules:

• Frames are inserted at the active frame.

  • If only one frame in the destination timeline is selected, that frame is replaced with the first frame of the copied frames. All subsequent copied frames are inserted after the selected frame of the destination timeline, and all frames that initially followed the ...