Flash 8 Cookbook

10.3. Dividing the Timeline into Segments

Problem

You have a lengthy timeline and want to divide it into logical sections.

Solution

Divide the timeline into scenes, frame segments, or movie clips.

Discussion

Movies with significant animation and video can have hundreds or even thousands of frames. To facilitate authoring, you may want to divide your timeline into segments. Flash offers several ways of dividing movies in time. Which you select depends on various factors, including which makes sense intuitively, whether and how you intend to implement ActionScript in the movie, and even more broadly, how you intend to architect the overall project.

Tip

Flash documents can have a maximum of 16,000 frames per timeline.

If you are an animator, and you are developing cartoons meant to be played from beginning to end in order, without user interaction, the traditional division of the timeline into scenes is probably a good option. Using Flash scenes, you can break the timeline into arbitrary sections, working on one at a time. At runtime, Flash plays the scenes back, without interruption, in order (though you can reorder scenes, as needed). From the point of view of ActionScript and Flash movie architecture, scenes are primitive and generally more trouble than they are worth. But for long, linear animations and videos that lack interactivity, scenes are a good selection.

Every Flash movie has at least one scene—the main timeline that appears when you create a movie. You can subdivide this timeline ...