Using Frames And Keyframes - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-GETTING STARTED WITH FLASH Getting Started

58 Flash Basics
To change the display of frames in the Timeline:
1.
Click Frame View in the upper-right corner of the Timeline to display
the Frame View pop-up menu.
2.
Select from the following options:
To change the width of frame cells, select Tiny, Small, Normal,
Medium, or Large. (The Large frame-width setting is useful for
viewing the details of sound waveforms.)
To decrease the height of frame cell rows, select Short.
To turn the tinting of frame sequences on or off, select
Tinted Frames.
To display thumbnails of the content of each frame scaled to fit the
Timeline frames, select Preview. This can cause the apparent
content size to vary.
To display thumbnails of each full frame (including empty space),
select Preview in Context. This is useful for viewing the way
elements move within their frames over the course of the
animation, but previews are generally smaller than with the
Preview option.

Using frames and keyframes

A keyframe is a frame in which you define a change to an object's
properties for an animation or include ActionScript code to control some
aspect of your document. Flash can tween, or automatically fill in, the
frames between keyframes you define in order to produce fluid animations.
Because keyframes let you produce animation without drawing each
individual frame, they make creating animation easier. You can easily
change the length of a tweened animation by dragging a keyframe in
the Timeline.
The order in which frames and keyframes appear in the Timeline
determines the order in which they are displayed in a Flash application.
You can arrange keyframes in the Timeline to edit the sequence of events in
an animation.