Layers and Frames

Frames

You know that Frames keep the drawings which are displayed at the certain moment of the lifespan of your Flash file. Compiled Flash files often called movies, but in your previous exercises all your files had only one frame – one moment. So, why call it movie?

Now we will start to extend our movie in the time – by adding one more dimension – Timeline to the files.

Open new file but don’t draw anything yet. Add couple more layers to the timeline. All of them for now consist of one frame.

Place the mouse cursor on the red hairline cursor at the top of the Timeline panel. Hit F5 button several times. You will see that with every hit the Timeline extends for one frame. If you will press and hold F5 Timeline will grow too. There are another options to extend the timeline (for example by clicking Menu-Insert-Frame) – but F5 shortcut is very convenient.

You’ve noticed that all layers are extended simultaneously. However if you highlight one of the frames of any layer and then use F5 it will extend only one layer. Layers are not necessary should be of the same length – one may expire sooner. One detail – if you highlight the layer name and all frames turn black then F5 will add as many frames as highlighted.

Now make sure that one layer has a longer lifespan (let’s say 60 frames – it will be 5 seconds) and other shorter (24 frames – 2 seconds) . Draw something in both layers. When you test your file you will see that some drawings disappear for a while.

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