'Stretching' a Flash movie

boywonder · 08-07-2003, 02:01 AM

Hi,
I received a flash movie from a client to use in their web site... a friend of their's made it. Pretty nice actually considering the author was not experienced at all with flash.

any way, for some reason he built it at only 5 FPS and as you can imagine the animation is not really smooth. I have an idea to stretch the movie out to 3 times it's length (in frames) and knock the FPS up to 15 to achieve a nicer animation.

So, is there a way to take the entire timeline, or just even one layer at a time, and extend it while keeping all keyframes at the same ratio... so if I had a layer of 30 frames with keyframes at 10,20,30... I would like to extend it to 90 and have the keyframes stay in ratio at 30,60,90... make sense?

If anyone has a clue that makes one of us

ACJavascript · 08-08-2003, 03:29 PM

How about trying to change the Frame Rate instead?
Might be simpler

boywonder · 08-08-2003, 05:35 PM

well, that's my problem kind of... I want to change the frame rate from 5 to 12 or so frames per second. But I don't want to speed up the movie if you know what I mean. It's just to get a smoother animation. I will need to extend the total frames for every layer to offset the higher frame rate, hopefully keeping all keyframes at the correct relative positions in the process. I don't think there's an easy way to do it unfortunately. Thanks.

MotherNatrsSon · 08-08-2003, 05:48 PM

I have Flash 5 and am not extremely familiar with it but I do know that in Photoshop, in the animation part of Image Ready, they have a function called "tweening". Tweening automatically adds frames between two selected frames. For you to keep the proportions, you would have to do the math and figure out how many frames you would have to add "inbeTWEEN" the existing frames.

If Flash has a function similar to "tweening" it would be your solution. I would check out the user guide and hit a couple of hardcore Flash sites where there are people that use it more regularly than most here do.

MNS

bradyj · 08-08-2003, 06:53 PM

There is no simple way to do what you are talking about, and it makes sense. You want to UP the frame rate (from 5 to 12) but you want to keep a similiar speed by adding more frames into the mix, correct?

You have to go layer by layer, and drag each keyframe out to it's needed point... start large and go down. If you have your keyframes at 10, 20, 30. Move 30 to 90, 20 to 60, 10 to 30... and so on.

That's really the only way to do it without hacking up the whole thing, and once you get into it, it'll be monotonous, but not too time consuming.

That help?

boywonder · 08-08-2003, 08:12 PM

Thanks all! - yes bradyj exactly... it was wishful thinking, I pretty much came to that same conclusion. Figured it couldn't hurt to ask around though if there was a way for Flash to handle the math and adjust keyframes automatically.

Flash Help said something to the effect of - it's wise to settle on a frame rate prior to creating the movie. ie no easy way for this...

thank you