Subtitles of the Movie

As you work more and more with shape and motion tweens you'll sometimes encounter a broken or dashed line in your timeline instead of a solid arrow. This is an example here in these four layers of the dashed or broken line that I'm talking about. You can see over here in my shape hints file that there is an example of a working shape tween with a solid line, you have an arrow pointing from one key frame to the next one. Now these dashed lines are Flash's way of telling you to double check your tween, this is quite common even for me and I've been using Flash for years now. So In this movie, I provide some tips and techniques for avoiding or fixing the most common mistakes that I see in my students' files and the causes of these problems. My first tip is make sure you have at least two key frames before applying the tween. That's the problem with my first layer here. Notice that there's a key frame in frame one but nothing over here. So you can tween all day long but this will never give you the results you want. All Flash tween types require exactly two key frames, one at the start and one at the end of the animation sequence. Let's go ahead and hide that layer and my second example is when creating shape tweens make sure your objects in each of the key frames is in fact a shape and not a grouped object, symbol, or text element. In this example, I have a nice shape here in frame one but I have a symbol here, notice that there's a bounding box around that shape and if I open up the properties inspector and click on that. Notice that it says graphic; in fact, I can change that to a button so in terms of shape tweens you can't use symbols. Now the bottom example here in layer number three, symbol problem number one, and this is the most common problem that I encounter is that I have two key frames all right and I have a graphic shape in frame forty but I have a symbol in frame one. So this is a motion tween, notice that the colors different, with the motion tween you need to have two symbols no shapes at all. So just make sure that if you're working with shape tweens you have two shapes, if you're working with motion tweens you have two symbols that you're trying to animate. Now if your shape tweening text as I have here in the fourth layer, let's go ahead and hide that one and open up the text problem layer. Notice that I have a dash line there, this text here in frame one is in fact a shape but the second one in the second key frame is not a shape. So notice that as soon as I break this apart twice by pressing control B on my key board. And let's go ahead and reapply its still showing a broken tween. Let me show you another trick cause sometimes if you take off the tween then reapply it, yeah, now its working. Notice that before after I changed that to a shape from I broke apart the text twice to create a shape. I still had the dash line so another tip is sometimes it is working but Flash doesn't recognize it so go ahead and turn off the tween and then turn it back on again here from the properties inspector and then there is a healthy, working shape tween, green color with an arrow and a line pointing from the first key frame to the second key frame. My next tip is try to maintain only one object on the layer at a time. This tends to be more finicky with motion tweens, you'll definitely only want to have one symbol in the layer at a time that your animating at a time. With shape tweens you can get away with more that one but as a general rule try to limit your each layer to only one object at a time or shape in that layer. And my last tip is at times you may need to erase the tween and start over from the first key frame. Occasionally I have no idea why Flash's shape tweens break. Everything looks fine or was working a second ago and now its not rather than try to puzzle out a reason its usually faster just to erase the entire layer and start over. So in this case you would just click on the layer that giving you a problem, press the delete layer icon there, add a new layer and start over from scratch. It takes a little bit longer in the short term but in the long term its probably quicker than trying to spend hours and hours trying to figure out why Flash isn't doing what you want it to do. Often times its easier just to throw up your hands and lose the battle but win the war. And that will conclude this section of the tutorial on creating shape tween animations in Flash CS3. In this section you've learned how to shape tween simple shapes, lines and strokes as well as shape tween text that's been broken apart into simple shapes. You've also learned how to apply shape hints to you shape tween animations to get better control over the way that Flash sets them up and creates them. In this movie, you've gotten some tips for avoiding or fixing the most common mistakes that you'll encounter when setting up your shape tweens. We may now move onto the next section of the tutorial, creating motion tween animations and review basic motion tweening techniques as well as how to animate color and size, how to create rotating and spinning animations, how to tween affects, motion guide tweening and much, much more.