Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Editing Your Frame-by-Frame Animation

It's rare that your first crack at any given animation will be your last. Typically, you'll start with a few keyframes, test the result, add a few frames, delete a few frames, and so on until you get precisely the look you're after.

This section shows you how to perform the basic frame-level edits you need to take your animation from rough sketch to finished production: inserting, copying, pasting, moving, and deleting frames.

Figure 3-7. The first time you run your animation in Flash Player, Flash assumes that you want to run it over and over (and over and over). Fortunately, you can rid Flash of this annoying assumption. Right-click (Control-click) your animation, and then click Loop to remove the checkmark. Other useful options include stopping your animation, rewinding it, and even stepping through it frame by frame. Chapter 19 covers animation testing in depth.

Selecting Frames and Keyframes

Selecting a single frame or keyframe is as easy as zipping down to the timeline and clicking the frame or keyframe you want to select.

But if you want to select multiple frames, Flash gives you four additional selection alternatives:

• To select multiple contiguous frames. Click the first frame you want to select, and then drag your mouse to the last frame you want to select. The selected frames show a highlight, as shown in Figure 3-8. Alternatively, click the ...