Working with Movie Clips > Using actions and methods to control Timelines > Changing movie clip position and appearance

Changing movie clip position and appearance

To change the properties of a movie clip as it plays, you can use the setProperty action or write a statement that assigns a value to a property. If you load a movie into a target, the loaded movie inherits the properties of the targeted movie clip. Once the movie is loaded, you can change those properties.

Some properties, called read-only properties, have values that you can read but not set. You can write statements to set any property that is not read-only. The following statement sets the _alpha property of the movie clip instance wheel, which is a child of the car instance:

car.wheel._alpha = 50;

In addition, you can write statements that get the value of a movie clip property. For example, the following statement gets the value of the _xmouse property on the main Timeline and sets the _x property of the customCursor instance to that value:

onClipEvent(enterFrame){
	customCursor._x = _root._xmouse;
}

You can also use the getProperty function to retrieve movie clip properties.

The _x, _y, _rotation, _xscale, _yscale, _height, _width, _alpha, and _visible properties are affected by transformations on the movie clip's parent, and transform the movie clip and any of the clip's children. The _focusrect, _highquality, _quality, and _soundbuftime properties are global; they only belong to the level 0 Timeline. All other properties belong to each movie clip or loaded level. The table below lists all the movie clip properties:
Properties

_alpha

_highquality

_totalframes

_xscale

_currentframe

_name

_url

_y

_droptarget

_quality

_visible

_ymouse

_focusrect

_rotation

_width

_yscale

_framesloaded

_soundbuftime

_x

_height

_target

_xmouse