Flash glossary: Property keyframe
A property keyframe is a frame within a tween span in Adobe Flash Professional where you explicitly define one or more property values for the tween target object. Each property you define has its own property keyframes. If you set more than one property in a single frame, then the property keyframes for each of those properties reside in that frame. You can view each property of a tween span and its property keyframes in the Motion Editor. You can also choose which types of property keyframes to display in the Timeline from the tween span context menu.
You define changes to an object's properties for an animation in the property keyframes. Flash can tween, or automatically fill in, the property values between the property keyframes in order to produce fluid animations. Because property keyframes let you produce animation without drawing each individual frame, they make it easy to create animated sequences. A series of frames containing tweened animation is called a motion tween.
Black diamonds indicate the last frame and any other property keyframes in the Timeline. Property keyframes are frames that contain property changes explicitly defined by you. You can choose which types of property keyframes to display by right-clicking (or Command-clicking) a motion tween span and choosing View Keyframes from the context menu. Flash displays all types of property keyframes by default. All other frames in the span contain interpolated values for the tweened properties of the target object.
Do not confuse property keyframes with standard keyframes; the Timeline icon for a property keyframe is a solid diamond, whereas a standard keyframe icon is an empty or filled circle.
You arrange both property keyframes and keyframes in the Timeline to control the sequence of events in your document and its animation.
To learn more about animating with property keyframes and the Motion Editor, see the section titled Work with property keyframes in the Flash documentation.
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