Creating Animation > Creating keyframes

Creating keyframes

A keyframe is a frame where you define changes in the animation. When you create frame-by-frame animation, every frame is a keyframe. In keyframe (tweened) animation, you define keyframes at important points in the animation and let Flash create the content of frames in between. Flash displays the interpolated frames of a tweened animation as light blue or green with an arrow drawn between keyframes. Flash redraws shapes in each keyframe. You should create keyframes only at those points in the artwork where something changes.

Keyframes are indicated in the Timeline: a keyframe with content on it is represented by a solid circle, and an empty keyframe is represented by a vertical line before the frame. Subsequent frames that you add to the same layer will have the same content as the keyframe.

To create a keyframe, do one of the following:

Select a frame in the Timeline and choose Insert > Keyframe.
Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) a frame in the Timeline and choose Insert Keyframe.