Concepts > Flash for Beginners  
     
 
I know that many people are interested in the word “flash” and when it provides you the power of animation with such a small size, the power and demand goes immense.But I would suggest that while creating any flash file, please analyse the requirement. Flash designs should be used if the website or your presentation need to be enhanced, I should not be a hindrance to the usability of you website.
 
 
 
 
You should be clear about some terms in flash :-
 
 

 

  
 
Timeline – The most striking feature of flash is its Timeline.When you open a new document in Flash, the top panel (which is a timeline) has a number of divisions called frames. Any animation (movement) that you want to play is spread over a number of frames. Basically, a timeline can be thought of as a sequence of events, not based on user input but based on passage of time.
  
     
 
 
     
 

Frames – A Frame is a basic unit in the timeline. A basic frame takes a specific amount of time. The default setting is flash is set to 12 frames per second (fps). The faster the animation required, you can accordingly increase the number of frames per second.

 
 
KeyFrame – A keyframe is a frame that defines a major state change in the timeline. They also act as main location to place Macromedia actionscript.
 
 
 
 
Layers – They are present along the timeline as a stack of individual assets. Layers help us to keep track of individual assets among many assets that exist in a single frame of your movie.
  
     
  Depth – When we add objects in the flash document, they are given a particular depth. This is to control the level of these objects. All objects that are added by design tools are created at depth 0.Objects added by actionscripting can be given any other depth.
You must be wondering how can one remember the depths as the objects increase? Not to worry, flash provides an inbuilt function MovieClip.getNextHighestDepth() which allots the next available depth to the object. 		 
     
 

Symbols

 
 
There are three basic symbols in Flash –
 
 

Graphics – It is the most simple symbol type. They are used for simple graphics assets that need to be reusable. You should remember two main points while using a graphics symbol. One, that the graphics symbol timeline is linked to the main timeline. Second, graphics symbol require less file size and less memory overhead.

 
 

Button – This symbol provides the basic button functionalities like click and rollover states. The button has three states viz up (mouse off), over(mouse over), and down (mouse press). There is another additional frame to define the hit area of the button.

 
  Movie Clip – Movie Clips are the most important symbols in a flash movie. These symbols have their independent timeline. They can act like buttons, graphics or classes.  
     
  Create an object and press F8, you get a popup where you can select the type of symbol and the name of the symbol. A symbol can have number of instances. You can change all the instances by just making the changes in symbol.