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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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Before you begin your first animation in Flash there are some things that you will want to do with your default layout. In this section I look at the default layout controls you will want to adjust for your needs.

Setting up your Timeline

When you open Flash and create a standard default Flash movie you are presented with a blank screen. It looks something like this:

Figure 1

Actually, you do not have a blank page at all. Flash has subtly turned on and off all sorts of settings.

The first immediate settings that you see are the number of layers in the Timeline and the size of the stage. The Timeline comes with one layer, by default. The layer is called "Layer 1" and is set to the default view. You change the view of the Timeline from the top right hand corner. Select the icon that looks like to expand the different timeline views. You will be presented with the following:

Figure 2

The default view is "Normal." Selecting "Tiny" view will compress the timeline so that you can view more frames in the same space.

Figure 3

Selecting the Preview and Preview in Context options will show you content of the frame in the Timeline. This is useful for complex animations where you may have a large number of layers and animation sequences.

Figure 4

As many of the Flash animation sequences I work on end up requiring a lot of layers and animation, I will select the "Small" view (the "Tiny" view is too small for me). I will also select the option called "Short" that reduces the thickness of the layer.

Setting up the Stage

After you have set up your Timeline the next area you will want to focus on is the Stage. The Stage is the visible area that is presented to the user as they view your animation. By default the Stage is 550 x 400 pixels. To change the settings for the Stage you will want to select Modify→Document.... The Document Properties window opens as show in the following figure:

Figure 5

With Flash 8 you can now add "meta data" to your Flash movie. Meta data is information that is held in the Flash Movie. Search engines, such as Google, use Meta Data to help index the movie you are working on. For instance, you can add a title and description to your Flash movie:

Figure 6

The Dimensions section of the "Document Properties" window identifies how wide and high the area of the movie is. You can only use pixels.

You can also choose to match your Stage to the same size as a Printer page (576 px x 756 px) or, if you already have content on the Stage, you can select match the stage to the content on the stage. A stage can be measured to 100^th of a pixel.

Size of a movie is important. For instance, advertising will require that you define your movie to fit the space the ad will fill. The following are standard spaces for online advertising:

120x160 for a Skyscraper layout
160x600 for a Skyscraper layout
180x150 for a Rectangle layout
240x400 for a Rectangle layout
250x250 for a Popup layout
300x250 for a Rectangle layout
336x280 for a Transitional layout
468x60 for a Banner layout

The default background color of the Stage is white. When you export your Flash movie with a Web page, the background is used to color the background color of the Web page. However, if you are loading a Flash movie into another Flash movie or you set the Opacity of the Flash movie to "transparent" then the background color is transparent. You can use any color of the Web Safe colors to change the color of the background.

The Frame Rate counts how fast the movie will move. The higher the frame rate the faster the movie. The default is 12 fps, or frames per second. As a gauge, television broadcasts as 27 fps and movies in a theater play at 24 fps. The higher the frame rate the more content you can present and, the idea goes, the more realistic the image looks.

The final option allows you to choose the measurement you would like to use for rulers on the stage.

Adding Rulers and Grids

Most graphics tools allow you to use tools such as rulers, grids and guidelines to help you layout content. Similarly, you can do the same in Flash.

You can select View→ Rulers to add the rulers. The measurement option you chose in the Document Settings will determine the type of measurement you have in the ruler. The default is pixels. The following images shows the rulers along the left and top side of the stage.

Figure 7

If you click on the ruler itself, hold down the mouse and drag onto the stage you can add a guide.

Figure 8

Again, if you use Illustrator, Fireworks or any other graphics tool that you will familiar with this concept. The default color for the guides is lime green. You can change the color by selecting View→Guides→Edit Guides.. from the menu. The following popup appears that allows you to change the color of the guides, if you can see the guides, whether you can snap objects to the guide and strength of the snap accuracy.

Figure 9

In addition to guides you can also add a grid to your Stage. To add the grid select View→Grid→Show Grid from the menu. By default, the stage will look the following image:

Figure 10

As with the guides you can change the color, snap to features, snap accuracy and the size of the grid by selecting View→Grid→Edit Grid...

Figure 11

Summary

Flash provides you a number of tools you can use to help you manage your content on the stage and in the Timeline before you even begin working. Each of these tools can help you be more efficient in your work and, in turn, give you more time to focus on design and animation.

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