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by
kirupa | 3 November 2009
In the
previous page, you learned about frame rates and how
they work to make your animations look smooth or...not
smooth. There is a hands-on side to all of this, and in this
page, you will learn how this all works in Flash and also
how to change the frame rate in Flash.
Flash, like many digital animation programs, abstracts away
a lot of the details related to frames and frame rates. In
fact, all you really ever have to worry about is your frame
rate and how long your animation will be running for.
Generating intermediate frames are taken care of by the
tweening engine. The only times you have to worry about the
intermediate frames is if you are actually drawing each
frame by hand.
Let's look at how what you learned in the previous page
applies in practice. For a 1 second animation, your timeline will look as
follows:
The key things to notice are the values at the bottom
right. The duration of the animation is 1 second, the frames
per second is 24, and the playhead is currently on Frame 24.
If I change the frame rate to 12, as you can guess, it now
takes twice as long for the animation to finish:
The duration of my animation jumped from 1 second to 1.9
seconds. Despite all of this changing, notice that I never
had to define additional frames. This should seem very
casual because the equation for determining the frame rate
is number of frames divided by the duration. You can
mathematically manipulate these variables to solve for the
missing value.
A 24 frame animation with a frame rate of 12 frames per
second will take around 2 seconds to finish.
The most common way to change your frame rate
is to use the Properties panel and change it globally for
your entire application:
The default rate is 24 in more recent versions of Flash,
and like I mentioned in the previous page, that is a good
value to keep your frame rate at.
When you are working with more interactive
types of animations, you may want to change your frame rate
while your application is running. Fortunately, in
ActionScript 3, you have easy access to the frame rate
property.
The way you access the frame rate is through:
- stage.frameRate
Because stage is global, you can call the frameRate
property from pretty much anywhere in your application. You
can easily set the frame rate value as well since this is a
property that you can both read and write:
- stage.frameRate
= 25;
That's all there is to programmatically being able to set
the frame rate. I never said it was complicated.
Well, this wraps up or overview of
frames, rates, and everything in between in the world of
Flash. The one thing I did not go into great detail is how
my example on the first page was created, so I have provided
the source for this below:
Just a final word before we wrap up. What you've seen here is freshly baked content without added preservatives, artificial intelligence, ads, and algorithm-driven doodads. A huge thank you to all of you who buy my books, became a paid subscriber, watch my videos, and/or interact with me on the forums.
Your support keeps this site going! 😇
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Frame Rates - Page 2
