MX

Web Designer MX Premium Flash Animation
Summary

Web Designer MX Premium keyframes are "snapshots" of your animation at any point in time.
Web Designer MX Premium automatically produces a smooth blend or tween of objects from
one keyframe to the next to produce a smooth Flash animation.

There is no timeline. Instead, the Frame Gallery shows your snap shot keyframes though time
(top down). Just click the frame name to see and edit that keyframe.

If you set the Web Designer MX Premium frame display time to be 2s then it will take 2 seconds
to animate objects from their position at the start of one keyframe to their positions at the start of
the next keyframe. Use the Animation Properties dialog to set frame display period.

To tell Web Designer MX Premium which objects are to be blended or tweened between one
keyframe and the next, you name the object you want to tween. For each new object you want
to animate click the Names button on the Selector Tool Infobar and give it a name (or select
the menu "Utilities" > "Names"..). The object must have exactly the same name on
subsequent frames.

When you create a new keyframe (snap shot) you usually do this by copying the current frame,
and this copies all objects to the new frame along with their names. Then just move the objects as
required.
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All other (non-named) items appear static for the duration (display period) of the keyframe.

You can move, enlarge, reduce, rotate, stretch, alter the color or transparency between Web
Designer MX Premium frames. Transforming objects in this way is very efficient.

There is an overall frame rate for the whole Flash movie. The more Flash frames-per-second, the
larger the Flash file and the smoother the animation.

Because each Web Designer Premium frame is a snap shot of the full animation, all objects that
should appear at that snap shot should appear in the frame. You can't blend an object from frame
1 to frame 3 without it appearing on frame 2.

You can change shapes, text or photos as allowed by the six transform rules described earlier
(move, resize, squash/skew, rotate, flat transparency and color change). If you change the shape
in any other way it won't work.

The Flash animation is clipped to the page dimensions you have specified in Web Designer MX
Premium.
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