Recipe 3.10. Customizing the Display of Layers and Frames

Problem

Frames and layers in the timeline are too big, require excessive scrolling, and take up too much screen space, or are too small, making it hard to see their contents.

Solution

Change the height of the layers and the width of the frames, as needed.

Discussion

The timeline is capable of displaying considerable information about a movie, its structure, and its contents. It is also used for selecting movie elements and specifying where to insert new elements. Unfortunately, you might feel that the timeline, layers, and/or frames are working against you. For example, you might have so many layers that you are either forced to scroll up and down through the layer stack constantly, or the layer stack might take up an unacceptable amount of screen space. Or your movie might have so many frames that you spend all your time scrolling left and right trying to find a given section.

Before simply adjusting the way in which Flash displays the timeline, it's a good idea to evaluate whether there might be some more basic things you can do to make the timeline easier to work with. If you're used to working with graphics programs, such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, you may be trying to apply your workflow from those programs to Flash. However, it's worth noting that Flash uses a unique paradigm, and just because something works in Photoshop or Illustrator, that doesn't mean it's the best way to do something in Flash. If timelines in Flash are getting cluttered, it's possible that you're not making good use of some of the features of the program. As an example, Flash enables you to encapsulate elements in symbols. Some symbols, such as movie clips and graphics, have timelines of their own. That means you can effectively have timelines within timelines. Don't go overboard with nesting symbols, but the judicious application of symbols can make timelines much less cluttered, because the contents are distributed over more timelines.

After you've determined that you are optimizing how you use timelines, you can also manage the way in which the timelines are displayed within Flash. The most primitive control is the height of the timeline as a whole, which you can adjust by hovering the mouse over the black line that separates the timeline from the stage, until the mouse is a two-headed arrow. Then, drag up or down to increase or decrease the window holding the timeline.

Another way to make additional room for layers in the timeline is to lower the overall layer height. To do so, from the upper-right corner of the timeline, click the Frame View button and select Short. The Short option, toggled off by default, drops the height of every layer by 25%. The change is usually worthwhile because the legibility of the frames is barely affected.

You can also change layer height one layer at a time, using the Layer Height setting of the Layer Properties dialog box (Modify Timeline Layer Properties). This is particularly useful when working with sounds, because Flash displays sound waveforms in the timeline, and by heightening the layer, you achieve a better visual representation of the sound, which facilitates syncing. This technique is discussed in Recipe 17.12.

The Frame View menu also enables you to specify the width of frames. By changing frame width, you affect the amount of horizontal scrolling required to navigate the timeline. That is, lowering frame width causes more frames to be displayed and minimizes scrolling; however, it also diminished the legibility of the timeline. Frame width options include, from smallest to largest, Tiny, Small, Normal, Medium, and Large. These five settings are available in the Frame View menu.

The Frame View menu includes a pair of extreme view settingssettings that are useful only in rare circumstances. These are Preview and Preview In Context. These settings, rather than representing a frame's contents with a solid circle and/or shading, actually display the frame's contents in the frame itself. To accomplish this feat, Flash greatly increases the size of each frame, and then reduces the stage contents to fit in that frame. Preview shows only the contents of the frame, while Preview In Context shows the contents of the frame as well as nearby contents. In effect, this setting converts the timeline into a set of thumbnails, which may be useful to cartoon animators.

The trade-off between the need to scroll and the legibility of frames limits the flexibility of changing frame widths as a practical tool. That is, there is a range of acceptable frame widths, and in most contexts, you will probably use either Small or Normal. This limitation brings up the need for an alternative way of managing long timelines. Flash makes it possible to segment timelines into scenes, and many Flash developers break timelines into a series of consecutive movie clips.