Adobe Flash Professional

You have already made some minor edits to animations, if you’ve followed the learning guide in a linear fashion until you arrived at this section. For example, you have changed the position of a tweened instance to create a position tween, and then edited its motion path. You may have changed the scale or alpha transparency of the tweened instance to make it fade in and out or grow/shrink in size.

The following sections explore how you can make other kinds of edits to customize your animation in other ways—most notably, with the Motion Editor. To open the Motion Editor, select Window > Motion Editor.

The Motion Editor is a large panel that may cover a hefty percentage of your screen real estate. This may not be an issue if you have a dual-monitor setup or can function with an insane resolution, but could be an issue if you’re working with one monitor or on a laptop. The following workspace options may help your animation workflow when space is a concern.

• Assign a keyboard shortcut to the Motion Editor, such as Pause or Home (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts or Flash > Keyboard Shortcuts). Create a new set and then assign the custom shortcut. Resize the Editor so it fills the workspace and leave the motion editor floating. Open and close it when necessary using this shortcut.
• Create a Motion Editor workspace (Edit > Workspace > New) and a Timeline/Stage workspace, where each view is optimized for each area of the workspace. Assign Keyboard Shortcuts to each workspace, and toggle between workspaces as needed.

Why use the Motion Editor?

You can add an ease and adjust properties using the instance and Motion Property inspectors, and even add keyframes to your animation by making changes in the various controls across a tween span. However, there are several things that you can only achieve by using the Motion Editor:

• Add different ease presets or custom ease. You can only add Simple (Slow) ease using the Motion Property inspector. The Motion Editor lets you add different presets, add multiple presets, or create a Custom ease.
• You can apply eases to individual properties, and see the effects of these eases on individual property graphs.
• You can disable or remove easing from properties.
• Change individual control points (property keyframes) to roving or non-roving, either through a context menu or by dragging them onto one of the vertical frame boundaries.
• The Motion Editor is the only way to make certain kinds of animations, such as creating a curved path tween on an individual property by adjusting the curve on a property graph.

The Motion Editor contains a list of rows that provide information about all of the existing properties of the selected tween, and eases that are available to apply those properties. The Editor also has controls that let you modify the animation, and add new color effects, filters, or eases to the instance that you can then proceed to tween. Of course, it also contains a graph that lets lets you control the values at property keyframes across the tween span, and how Flash animates between those kefyrames using curves.

Using the Timeline

The Motion Editor contains a timeline much like the main Timeline in Flash: it has a playhead that you use to scrub through a tween, and frame numbers that span across the top so you know what frame you’re on. You can scrub the playhead to view the animation or move the viewable frames forward or back on the timeline, or click a frame number to move the playhead to that position.

Changing values

The Motion Editor contains hot text, which you can use to modify a keyframe or even add one, and set up the way the Motion Editor appears. The hot text in the Motion Editor works the same way as it does in other parts of Flash: you mouse over it until you see a double-ended arrow and then click and drag to adjust the value, or click the text and enter the value yourself. If a property keyframe does not exist at the playhead position, a new one is inserted with the value you enter in the hot text.

The hot text displays the current values of each property, and updates as you scrub the playhead to a new location.

Tip: You can hold the Shift key while dragging hot text to change values 10 units at a time.

Referencing tooltips

Tooltips in the motion editor can be useful for quickly referencing a current value, frame number, or what a hot text value will adjust. When you drag a control point, the current value and frame position updates in the tooltip that appears over the graph. Tooltips are also helpful when you’re starting to use the panel, because they can help you understand what a particular control is for.

If these tooltips get in the way and you want to turn them off, or you need to turn them on, you can toggle them by right/Control-clicking a graph (but not on a curve or control point), and choose Show Tooltips from the context menu.