Organizing Frames and Layers

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If you've ever wanted to learn how to do Flash animation editing, you've come to the right place. This two-part series offers you a crash course. It is excerpted from chapter four of the book Flash CS3: The Missing Manual, written by E.A. Vander Veer (O'Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596510446). Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media.

Part 1 of this book gets you started launching Flash, creating your own drawings, and transforming them into moving animations. Most animation work, though, takes place after you’ve got all the frames and layers in place. Like a film director slaving away in the cutting room, as an animator you spend most of your time testing, editing, and retesting your movie.

This chapter is your crash course in Flash animation editing. Here you’ll see how to reorganize your animation horizontally (over time) by cutting, pasting, and rearranging frames on the Timeline. You’ll also see how to reorganize your animation vertically by shuffling and restacking the layers you’ve added to it.

Working with Frames

When you create an animation, you build it from frames and keyframes. Editing your document is a simple matter of moving, cutting, and pasting those frames until they look good and work well. You can perform these operations on individual frames or on multiple frames by combining them into groups, as you’ll see at the end of this section.

Copying and Pasting Frames

Copy and paste are the world’s favorite computer commands with good reason. These functions let you create a piece of work once (a word, line, shape, drawing, or what have you) and then quickly recreate it to build something even more complex with a minimum of effort. Well, Flash lets you cut, copy, and paste not just the content of your frames but your frames themselves, from one part of your Timeline to another.

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This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Flash CS3: The Missing Manual, written by E.A. Vander Veer (O'Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596510446). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.