Adobe Flash Professional CS3 - Manual (Page 236)

FLASH CS3
User Guide
230
About representations of animation in the Timeline
Flash distinguishes tweened animation from frame-by-frame animation in the Timeline as follows:
• A black dot at the beginning keyframe indicates motion tweens; a black arrow with a light blue background
indicates intermediate tweened frames.
• A black dot at the beginning keyframe indicates shape tweens; a black arrow with a light green background
indicates intermediate frames.
• A dashed line indicates that the tween is broken or incomplete, such as when the final keyframe is missing.
• A black dot indicates a single keyframe. Light gray frames after a single keyframe contain the same content with
no changes and have a black line with a hollow rectangle at the last frame of the span.
• A small a indicates that the frame is assigned a frame action with the Actions panel.
• A red flag indicates that the frame contains a label.
• A green double slash indicates that the frame contains a comment.
• A gold anchor indicates that the frame is a named anchor.
About frame rates
The frame rate, the speed the animation is played at, is measured in number of frames per second (fps). A frame rate
that’s too slow makes the animation appear to stop and start; a frame rate that’s too fast blurs the details of the
animation. A frame rate of 12 fps usually gives the best results on the web. QuickTime and AVI movies generally
have a frame rate of 12 fps, while the standard motion-picture rate is 24 fps.
The complexity of the animation and the speed of the computer the animation is being played on affect the
smoothness of the playback. To determine optimum frame rates, test your animations on a variety of machines.
Because you specify only one frame rate for the entire Flash document, set this rate before you begin creating
animation.