Wednesday 3 June 2009

A Tutorial about Flash

A tutorial about Flash I found on http://www.cartoonsolutions.com/store/catalog/Editing-Multiple-Frames-of-Animation-sp-77.html

Editing Multiple Frames of Animation

Successfully move, scale or alter multiple frames of animation together.Have you ever finished animating something only to decide that you need to change it's placement on the stage or size on the screen? You may have tried selecting all of the frames on that layer and moved the first frame, hoping that the remaining frames in the layer would also move with it, only to find out that you have only moved the first key frame and nothing else.
The good news is that yes, you can move all of the frames at the same time, you just need to use the "Edit Multiple Frames" feature so that Flash will understand that you want to alter more than just one frame.
Let's take a look at a sample project where we want to scale up the animation on the character layer:
Look at the onion skinning features and you'll see on the far right of them two boxes that are both colored in. This is the "Edit Multiple Frames" feature and is what you want click on to activate.

This feature operates just like the "Onion Skinning" feature. Place your timeline marker in the middle of your animated frames and pull the handles out so that they encompass all of the animation that you wish to alter.

Once the handles are pulled out in the timeline, you should be able to see all of your key frames at once on the stage.

It is important to lock any layers that you do not want to alter or change. In this case, we will lock the 'background' layer so that it doesn't accidentally get selected.

Next you have to select all of the art on the stage. You can do this by either 'selecting all' (hotkey "Control"+"A") or by dragging over all of the art with the Arrow (V) tool. DON'T FORGET THIS STEP!

With all of the art selected, we'll use the "Free Transform" tool by pressing the "Q" keyboard shortcut, and pull on the corner handles to scale all of the art up at the same time.

You can do more than just scale or move the art, you can also apply filters to all of the symbols at the same time.

In this example we will also select "Tint" from the "Properties Bar" and choose a color to tint all of the symbols at the same time.

When you are finished, simply turn off the "Edit Multiple Frames" feature by clicking on it. You have now successfully edited multiple frames of animation!

IMPORTANT NOTE:You can use the "Edit Multiple Frames" feature on more than one layer at a time! You can use it on as many layers as you like. Just remember that if there are layers that you don't want to move, either lock those layers, or temporarily turn off their visibility so that they are not included when you edit the other frames.

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