“Timeline” view

In ‘Flash”, we have several choices to change the display of the “Timeline”.

Just click the downward-pointing black arrow in the gray bar.

This opens a drop-down menu with different display capabilities.

The first five options relate to the size for the display of the frames.

“Tiny” will display the frames very small and “Large” will display the frames very big.

The “Preview” option will show an icon in front of the layer for the objects that are placed in that layer.

“Preview in context” will not only show the icon in front of the layer, but will also have a ‘before’ and ‘after’ image showing the animation, like this is natural.

“Preview in context” will not only show the icon in front of the low, but will also be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ image in the animation, which is natural if there is animation.

The “Short” option will reduce the display portion of the layer and the icons are at the top of the layer.

Below we have the “Tinted Frames” option. When this is checked, which incidentally is the default mode, all frames used in our film have a gray background color. When this is unchecked, they are displayed with a white background.

Below that we have the “Help”. If you really cannot understand anything, just click on it. No, seriously, if you need additional help, click this option, this brings you to the “Adobe Help Center”, where you can learn about everything including the “Timeline”.

As the last two we have “Close” and “Close Group”.

For the first, the “Timeline” will close, the second will close the entire group. In this case, the “Timeline”, the “Output” window and the “Motion Editor” are closed.

 

The “Timeline”: a closer look

A brief explanation of the “Timeline” is certainly not a luxury, especially for those of us who first started working with “Flash”.

As I had told so in Lesson 4 of this course, the “Timeline” is the heart of our “Flash” movie.

The “Timeline” is divided into two parts. On the left side, we have the layers and on the right side, the frames.

Above the frames we have the play button.

When the movie is playing, this button moves through the frames in the “Timeline”.

The frames in a “Timeline” are numbered by 5, beginning at 1 to 5 – 10 – 15 … and so on.

The frames in the “Timeline” represent the duration of a “Flash” movie.The time of a “Flash” movie is based on a “Play Speed”, in “Flash”, we call this “FPS” which is an abbreviation of “frames per second.”

We can set the “FPS” in the “Properties Window”, which we have seen in Lesson 3 but, we also have the option to edit by clicking on the “FPS” at the bottom of the “Timeline”, and type another number.

On the left, we have a number that reflects the frame position of the “Play” button, and on the right we have a number that shows the time position of the “Play Button”.

So you can see from the information shown below that the play button is located on frame 12, the playback speed 24 frames per second, and so the time position of the Play button shows 0.5 seconds. This is an easy math.

When your “Flash” movie has hundreds of frames, it may be sometimes useful to know how long it will take, for a given frame to be displayed, without consulting a calculator for this..Yes?

What else can I say?

You can only add objects or frames to a selected layer.
A selected layer is colored blue.

In the next lesson we will look at how we add layers, and how we arrange them neatly.

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