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Working with movie clips
- LiveMotion supports multiple states in each movie clip, making it easy to create multistate animations (for example, animations that play in each state of a button rollover). When you export movie clip groups to Macromedia Flash (SWF), LiveMotion makes each a separate movie clip and connects them via scripts it writes automatically.
- Making objects into movie clips is essential for adding interactivity and scripts. LiveMotion styles that add interactivity (for example, the Script_Draggable style) must convert objects into movie clips to add interactivity. For information on the relationship of movie clips to scripts, see the Adobe LiveMotion 2.0 Scripting Guide.
- Animating movie clip groups can be more efficient than animating regular groups. See Regular groups versus movie clip groups.
A movie clip is a nested timeline that can contain labels, scripts, or other objects, or an interactive object that plays or functions independently of the composition animation. For example, you might want a logo to rotate continuously even after the main animation finishes. You might also want to have an object's animation play only when triggered by a user's action, such as clicking a button. Movie clip animations are also referred to as nested animations, and were called time-independent animations in LiveMotion 1.0. You create them by making an object or group a movie clip, and then creating an animation within the movie clip's timeline.
Initially, the Timeline window contains only one timeline: the composition timeline. All objects in the composition timeline are animated when the composition animation plays. However, each movie clip object or group has its own timeline. A movie clip is a single object, whereas a movie clip group can contain additional objects. (A regular group does not have its own timeline.)
Note the following:
To make an object a movie clip or to change a movie clip back to a non-movie clip object:
- Select the object in the Timeline window.
- Do one of the following:
- Choose Object > Movie Clip.
- Click the Make Movie Clip button
in the Timeline window.
An icon appears next to the object name in the object hierarchy when the object is a movie clip.
To open a movie clip's timeline:
Double-click the movie clip's name in the Timeline window. The timeline displays the contents of the double-clicked movie clip. Objects not contained in the movie clip's timeline are dimmed in the Composition window.
To close a movie clip's timeline:
- To move up one level in the hierarchy, click the Step Out button
next to the name of the current timeline. - To move up any number of levels in the hierarchy, select the name of the current timeline and choose the timeline you want from the pop-up menu.
Do one of the following:
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