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The
Tools Panel 
The
Property Inspector
The Timeline will be used in depth later in the Animation section, however, let's look at it briefly now. The Timeline contains the sequence of individual images that make up an animation. Essentially, it's frame 1, followed by frame 2, followed by frame 3, and so on. In reality it's like viewing a strip of 35mm film laid out on a table for you to follow, from left to right, frame by frame.
TIP: You will find the Timeline docked at the top of the screen by default, but as always you can reposition it anywhere you like. You may close the Timeline if you wish but it must be "floating" not docked at the time.
Hide the ImageYou can check the length of an animation by checking it on the Timeline. In addition to the individual Frames on the Timeline, it allows you to have as many layers as you want in the animation. As with the other programs in this course, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, objects drawn in one layer appear above or below objects in other layers. Each layer can contain separate animations too. This allows for multiple animations to occur at the same time. Layers in Animation will be covered later.
Although there is only one "main Timeline", Flash can have more than one Timeline in the movie. A large movie can be broken into several scenes, each one of these scenes will have a Timeline that exists concurrently with the main Timeline. Click the glasses icon below to see what the previous timeline looks like as a Flash Movie.
Having scenes make up a movie is a really good thing, it will allow you to move scenes around into any order and be duplicated if you wish. You should name each scene since the default name is Scene 1, Scene 2, and so on. Locate the Address Bar near the Timeline, it will tell you the name of the scene you are working in at the time.
NOTE: Above the top-left corner of the Stage you'll usually see the name of the current scene. The "clapper" icon indicates that this is the name of a scene.
Page Updated on March 2, 2003