Animation

Challenge
You’re working on an animation in Flash on your main time line. You then decide that you want to convert your animation into a movie clip. Should be easy right? You select all of your frames on the main time line, copy them, insert a new symbol (in this case a movie clip), and paste them into the new clip. Should be set to go, but what happens? All that wonderful animation that you spent so much time on goes wonky. Frames that once ended at frame 50 now continue to play until the end of the movie (frame 300). Now you have to go back in and delete the frames in each layer that extended to the end of your time line, and hope that you don’t forget anything as you fix your animation. What a waste of time and energy. Drives me nuts.

Solution
It’s so simple… finally figured it out last week. All you need to do is insert a blank key frame at the end of each animation layer before you copy and paste your frames into a new movie clip. Inserting a blank key frame will keep your tweens in place, end frames and all. No more images overlapping, no more deleting frames, and no more wasting time.

If you have had a similar problem, I hope this gives you back some time (Flash always seems to steal mine). If you have another solution for this problem, I would love to hear about it.