movie clip authoring 1

[dwnhllr]

i'm certain that these are really stupid questions, but i'm going to ask them anyway because i haven't been able to figure it out myself. here's the scenario:
A. movie background in it's own layer
B. new movie clip symbol

Question 1: How can i setup the environment of the new movie clip symbol (B) so that i can author it over a particular background? (i.e., without repasting the background into a new layer in the symbol)

Question 2: If my new movie clip contains a tween of 200 frames at 100 fps, and i am using actionscript to time my entire animation (using setIncrement()), is it possible to sync the timing of the two animations dynamically so that it will always run smooth?

 

[oldnewbie]

Don't really understand either of your questions! I can only question the fact that you would use a 100 framerate!

Regards,

 

[dwnhllr]

To elaborate, my first question relates to the arranging of graphics in the timeline of a movieclip symbol. I am repeatedly creating tweened animations which are in reference to the geometry of graphics in a particular background. While these background graphics are not intended to be a part of the movieclip symbol, I use them in another layer as a reference. However, it seems like the additional steps of selecting the appropriate background, placing it into my movieclip symbols timeline, and then beginning the movie is a waste of mouse clicks. Since most animations probably require some sort of graphically-referential movement, I was hoping that there is some feature in Flash MX to assist this part of the process.

As to my second question, I believe that I may have resolved it myself. However, as there may be other solutions to the problem, I will go ahead and describe it further. The problem relates to the timing of movieclips which are included in an actionscript-controlled flash app. My entire app. is in one frame and I am using actionscript for everything. However, I discovered that the performance of the basic drawing functions leaves something to be desired when creating complicated animations so I selected the most processor intensive components and created multiple movieclip symbols for several aspects. However, if these movieclips are played at the speed of the framerate they may not sync with the rate of my actionscipt. Also, based on my scripted framerate, the movie may have too many or too few frames for the length of the event that triggered the execution of the movieclip's timeline. I have worked around this by evaluating whether to play the current frame in the movieclip's timeline or whether to advance to the next frame. However, this again is a drag on overall performance, I gather.

Any thoughts? Maybe I've been in front of the computer for too long...?

 

[wangbar]

Accurate timing of movieclip animations is as simple as using nextFrame() and prevFrame() statements to advance them to exactly the point you require, which sounds like what you've hit on as a solution already.

Lining things up to a background - you can build the graphics on the main stage over the background you already have then select the new elements only and turn them into a clip (f8) rather than creating a fresh empty clip and then building the elements inside of it (CTRL+f8).

 

[dwnhllr]

Thank you wangbar, very helpful. You rock.

I actually built a class called 'MovieChronos' to handle how to display a particular movieclip since I wanted to tidy up my OnEnterFrame event. It's all fairly straightforward, but it isn't work I particularly wanted or expected to do at this point. I suppose that I expected Flash to have this sort of thing pre-built into Actionscript...