Touring the Timeline s Layer Features

Touring the Timeline's Layer Features

Flash graphically represents each layer as one horizontal section of the Timeline and provides controls for viewing and manipulating these graphic representations. Several features make it easier to work with graphics on layers, such as viewing the items on layers as outlines and assigning different colors to those outlines so you can easily see which items are on which layers. You can lock layers so you don't edit their contents accidentally, and you can hide layers to make it easier to work with individual graphics in a welter of other graphics. You can create special guide layers for help in positioning elements, masks for hiding and revealing layer contents selectively, and guides for animating motion along a path. (You learn more about motion paths in Chapter 9.)

Complex movies contain dozens of layers. Viewing and navigating such hefty Timelines can get tedious and confusing. Flash lets you create layer folders to organize the layers in a movie. You can keep all the layers related to one character or element together in one folder, for example. Flash considers a folder to be another type of layer, and the methods for adding and deleting layer folders are similar to those for adding and deleting layers. Layer folders don't by themselves hold graphic content, however, and folders have neither frames nor keyframes in the Timeline. (Keyframes are special frames in which you place your graphic elements; you'll learn about them in Chapter 7.)

Figure 6.1 offers a road map to the important layer features in the Timeline.

Figure 6.1. The Timeline represents all the layers in a Flash movie graphically. Layer folders let you organize layers in a complex movie. You can do much of the work of creating and manipulating layers and folders by clicking buttons in the Timeline.