Working with Movie Clips > About multiple Timelines
About multiple Timelines
Every Flash movie has a main Timeline located at level 0 in the Flash Player. You can use the loadMovie
action to load other Flash movies (SWF files) into the Flash Player at any level above level 0 (for example, level 1, level 2, level 15). Each movie loaded into a level of the Flash Player has a Timeline.
Flash movies at any level can have movie clip instances on their Timelines. Each movie clip instance also has a Timeline and can contain other movie clips that also have Timelines. The Timelines of movie clips and levels in the Flash Player are organized hierarchically so that you can organize and easily control the objects in your movie.
The hierarchy of levels and movie clips in the Flash Player
In Flash, this hierarchy of levels and movie clips is called the display list. You can view the display list in the Movie Explorer when you are authoring in Flash. You can view the display list in the Debugger when you are playing the movie in Test-Movie Mode, the stand-alone Flash Player, or in a Web browser.
The Movie Explorer shows the hierarchy of Timelines called the "display list"
Timelines in a Flash movie are objects and all have characteristics (properties) and the abilities (methods) of the predefined MovieClip object. Timelines have specific relationships with each other depending on their locations in the display list. Timelines that are nested inside other Timelines are affected by changes made to the Timeline on which they live. For example, if portland
is a child of oregon
and you change the _xscale
property of oregon
, portland
will also scale.
Timelines can also send messages to each other. For example, an action on the last frame of one movie clip could tell another movie clip to play.