It is finally time to start making things move so let us take a look at animation in the program. I have got a file already started up with some graphics in it and we just open that up first. I am going to file menu and choose open and we should find this in the lesson four folder of part one and it is called robot face animation.

So, we will open that file on up and take a look. Now, I have already added a bunch of goofy graphics for a robot face and I have also divided these graphics up amongst all the layers. Now, of course, when we animate we are going to making use of the timeline here but let us take some time to introduce some of the elements for the timeline first.

First of all, the numbers that we see across the top of timeline refer to frames and that is going to be important distinction in the program because what we are dealing with here is frame base animation.

Now, we are going to be converting those frame numbers into time using the frame rate that we can see down here at the bottom of the screen. Frame rate shows up in the properties window when every thing is deselected and we can see the rest of the document properties and the default frame rate is set to 12.

The first thing I want to talk about is what that frame rate is because a lot of people think of it as speed in the program and it does present itself its speed but a better term to use in this case would be smoothness. An easy way to understand frame rate would be to compare flash with some other media types and very specifically, we can pick out movies that you see in the theater or television.

Movies that we see in run at 24 frames per second and our television runs at about 30 and the biggest point that I want to make my point is numbers out is that we should not need to go much past 30 with our flash animation files.

Once you get up to 30 and beyond, you are actually cycling through the frames faster than you need to. So, we can pick a number somewhere around 20 to 30 and we will end up with the very acceptable frame rate. I really want to start worrying about frame rate when it starts to go blow at 15 because that our movies might start to see that flip as we moved through the frames

So, I am going to start off by changing our frame rate here to 20. Now, we take that frame rate and go back up to our timeline Window, we can see that these 20 frames here is going to correspond to one second and 40 frames is two seconds and so on.

The biggest thing we need to know about frame base animation is that is not going to play back like time base animation. You are probably familiar with seeing some examples of that, for instance, video on a computer.

The big difference between the two types is that time base animation is set up to a fix time. You see that with video especially if you are watching video on a very old computer. You know what happens when the program cannot quite keep up with the play back. It simply skips forward and frame base animations are frame rate that we set up is actually a target frame rate and what we are saying is the player should try to hit 20 frames per second.

Now, in most modern computers they will probably be able to do that but if you bring up a very slow computer and it quite hit 20then instead of skipping material, the flash player will simply slow down the frame rate.