The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide

Chapter 8. Copying Motion as ActionScript 3.0

Flash CS4 Professional features an interesting tool, introduced in Flash CS3, that helps bridge the gap between programmed and timeline-based animation. Available from the Timeline panel, this feature facilitates collaboration between designers and developers by converting timeline tweens and keyframe settings into ActionScript 3.0 code, and sometimes a flexible XML-based format used by the new Animator class. The ActionScript involved is generated automatically. This feature lets a designer use traditional animation techniques, complete with motion guides and easing, to provide sophisticated motion templates that a developer can harness to program animation for any number of additional objects, even in separate FLA files.

Copying Motion

Imagine a project in which three photos are each required to respond visually to a mouse click. The photos are expected to start small, and then increase in size and rotate slightly while easing to a stop. Ideally, this motion should include a bit of blur along the y-axis. The developer assigned to this project is perfectly comfortable writing the necessary ActionScript, but doesn’t have a stylistic sense of how the motion should ultimately be conveyed. Conversely, the designer on this project is thoroughly comfortable finessing the motion, but doesn’t know the first thing about code. How can these team members combine their efforts?

The clear answer is to make use of the authoring tool’s Copy Motion as ...