Adobe Flash Professional

Timelines in Flash contain static and tweened content, which both look and behave differently on a timeline. Static content is represented by gray frames, or gray frames with a dot in them. Motion-tweened content is represented by a blue tween span, which is a section of frames that you can select individually, move around, or manipulate as a single selection. Flash displays shape tweens as a series of light-green frames, with an arrow drawn between keyframes. Shape tweens and motion tweens are created and manipulated in different ways, which you will learn in the sections that follow.

Tween spans and static content are selected in different ways. Static content and shape tweens are selected as a single frame if you are in the default frame-based selection mode. New motion tweens use a span-based style of selection (even if you have frame-based selection active), which will be familiar to you if you’ve tried the span-based selection model in previous versions of Flash.

Note: Span-based and frame-based selection models are controlled by Flash Preferences. This learning guide assumes you have frame-based selection mode active in its exercise steps.

When you work with a Tween layer (any layer that contains a motion tween span), you will have a special context menu that appears when you right-click a frame on that layer.