Complex MC's in a movie

I ran into a problem the other day, that really I hadn't given much thought to. If you read this, hopefully this problem will never happen to you too. I recently added a clock to a website I'm working on. In Flash, an analog clock is generally a three frame object, that requires the playhead to loop between two frames. Well, this is a big problem when trying to add those frames directly to the _root. Everything you have on the main timeline now has to coincide with the workings of your clock.

The answer is to create a movie clip that will hold your clock. I use clock as the example, but it could be any other complex object. In the new movie clip, add each piece of the clock on a seperate layer. Then create a new layer to hold your actionscript. Then, when you put the clock onto the _root, it will work off its own timeline, and be independent of the main timeline's frames.

I realize that this is something that you could probably figure out on your own, but if you are new to Flash, remember that movie clips have timelines too.

Max