Now I’m trying to get my SWF Flash movie to dynamically resize in whatever size browser window it’s opened in. For the site I’m trying to make this happen in, I can’t use the HTML file.

Any way to do this?

Thank you,
Burt

You made my day, Jen.

Such a huge thing, though I’m sure it seems simple to you!

Stay tuned for more beginner’s questions.

Gratefully,
Burt

And yes, this is wonderfully helpful. I’m actually awed at how quickly you’ve responded. I can already see that this is a wonderful blog; I’ve been using the Lynda videos and will keep doing so for the overall training, but I’m so grateful to you for your quick, smart response!

Burt

There are a couple ways to copy the animation to new layers and speed that up - you can do either of the following:

* Hold the Alt-key and drag the tween span to the other layer. That will make a copy of the tween span on the new layer (this is probably the fastest way - I do that to stagger the same animation on a different layer.)

* Copy the animation as a motion preset (right-click the tween span and choose Save As Motion Preset), and apply it to instances on new layers. This is useful if you already have the instances laid out and you want to then apply the same animation to them after the fact.

* Copy and paste the frames. Right-click the tweened frames and choose Copy Frames from the context menu. Go to the new layer and right-click again and choose Paste Frames. This is probably the slower way to do this - Alt-drag is a much quicker way to do the same thing. This is the way to copy/paste a portion of a tween span or multiple layers of frames, though.

Note that it’s also easy to swap out the target instance of an animation after-the fact (meaning you might Alt-drag to copy a bunch of tween spans over and over, and *then* change the instances that are animated). Say you want to change the animated letter in your animation described above. All you need to do is create the new instance, and paste it onto the tween span or drag it from the library. You’ll be prompted “do you really want to change the target object?” and click Yes. Then you’ll have exactly the same animation, but a new instance is animated instead.

Hope that helps!
Jen.

I understand it’s a change (I had to learn it myself) but after a week it felt pretty natural, I found myself having to think to go back to the old ones :)

Yep, that’s correct. The new tweening model essentially exposes the way Flash has always worked, in a way. Flash Player only supports one color effect per instance, but in the old model you could interpolate between them. For example, if you had a tint on a first keyframe (instance) and “none” on the second keyframe (instance) Flash then interpoates between what looks like 100 to 0, but in actuality it’s between a tint and no tint.

The new tweening model has one object per instance. This is great for many reasons, but it does mean a change in this regard - you have to tween a single tint instead of using “none” in that way (which as you notice affects the entire tween). In the new model this does make “sense” because it will work like filters and all other properties - but it does take some getting used to. A tint/filter is applied to a tween (so even adding a filter mid-tween adds it to the entire tween span because it’s added to the instance itself — the motion object).

It’s important to remember that “keyframes” are not the same in Flash CS4. In the middle of a tween span you’re adding a *property change*, not a keyframe. A keyframe in a traditional sense is a copy of an entire instance. A tween span only has ONE instance, so the only true keyframe is on the first frame of a tween span. All of the little diamonds along a span are changes to the properties, not new copies of an instance. So if you add filters, change color effects, etc - you affect properties that exist for the entire tween. So if you add a tint, filter, anything - it happens for the entire tween, then you need to be attentive to how/where you change the values (becuase of auto-keyframing).

This is beginning to sound like a new blog post :) Good topic you brought up!

Hope that helps,
Jen.

I know for myself, this was a big learning curve change to the way I use the tool. I used to tween with Tinting 100 to “None”, and this would produce a tween. Now, when you set the drop down to “None”, flash removes all of the auto keyframes.

Another thing that’s kind of weird about selecting “Tint” on a frame somewhere down the timeline, is that the default tint color is set on the first keyframe (red), even if opacity is “0″, you get red tints inbetween 0-100, up to your specified color in the keyframe you added a tint to.

Traditionally, I would go back to frame 1 and set Tint to none, (which you used to be able to do). I guess the workaround is going to frame 1 and manually setting the tint color to the tint color you set in frame 10 and setting the opacity to 0, if it’s not already at 0.

The eraser would have limited usefulness on a path - you could only erase the end points because a motion path cannot be erased anywhere in the middle (a motion path cannot be broken - must be a solid line). So dragging the ends to edit the length with the Selection or Subselect should achieve the same result as an eraser, and is a lot faster.

If editing the path as a line is absolutely what you want to do, you can actually just copy and paste the motion path as a plain line, edit it as such, and paste it back onto the tween.