Motion migration guide for Flash CS4 Professional

What makes a motion tween

It helps to have a general understanding of what new motion tweens are all about in Flash CS4 before you dive into this migration guide.

A Flash CS4 motion tween has a single object in a tween span, and it is typically called the tween's target object. You set the properties of the target object across the tween span, and Flash creates the animation based on those property changes. If you're used to motion tweens in earlier versions of Flash, those tweens were composed of two or more instances and Flash created the interpolation between those two instances. So instead of creating motion between two different objects (keyframes), Flash CS4 manipulates the properties of a single object across a number of frames, similar to Adobe After Effects.

These new motion tweens are supported by all versions of Adobe ActionScript and Adobe Flash Player. You only need to make sure that what you use in the tween (such as 3D or filters) is supported by your publish settings.

Why motion tweens changed

It might seem confusing as to why tweening was suddenly changed in Flash, and so greatly. It's no secret that tweens in previous versions of Flash could be tricky to learn for many people, and sometimes even frustrating to use. If you managed to create a working motion tween, it was easy to break it (see that dashed arrow) if you modified anything about it. You were rather limited in what you could animate and how you did it, and then modifying those motion tweens could be frustrating.

There are lots of reasons why the new tweens are better and will be worth investing the small learning curve for:

• You cannot break a new motion tween, so you no longer need to deal with "dashed arrows."
• New tweens are easier to use, not only because you cannot break them. You directly manipulate objects on the Stage without needing to always think about keyframes. You don't even need to add keyframes—just manipulate the object and the keyframes are inserted for you.
• New motion tweens are easy to stretch and move. You just select and drag the span in the Timeline to move it, or drag the ends to stretch or resize the span.
• Motion paths are shown right on the Stage for all tweens. These motion paths are visual and directly editable, or you can just select and move the entire tween to a new location on the Stage.
• Motion paths in general are easier to use than motion guides (which you no longer need). The motion path for a tween is attached right to the tween.
• You have granular control over each property of a tween.
• You can use the Motion Editor with new motion tweens, which provides that granular control.
• The addition of the Motion Editor means tweens are more powerful in general. Each property and its keyframes are accessible and editable independently. For example, you can tween alpha separately from rotation, scale, x and y position, and so on.
• You can edit individual properties on a graph using curves in the Motion Editor to affect how quickly the change occurs over time.
• A tween does not need to have an instance attached to it (meaning, it has no target object for the tween). These empty tweens can then have new instances applied to them. All properties of that tween (as seen in the Motion Editor) will be saved until you apply a new instance to it.
• You can apply a new instance to an existing tween by just pasting it onto a tween to swap it out, drag a new instance from the Library, or use Swap Symbol.
• You can use the new 3D model with new tweens to animate 3D rotation and translation. You cannot use 3D with classic tweens.
• You can give your tween an instance name and then give other instances that same tween at runtime, simplifying the code you require to create animation with code.
• New motion tweens have preset eases you can apply to them, which are advanced and very useful for creating unique effects.
• You can create and apply custom eases that do not need to end at 100% (which was required in Flash CS3).
• You can save a tween as a preset and then reuse the animation in that or other documents, or import/export it for other users.
• Many more simple ease types are available in the new tweening model, which you can access from the Motion Editor.

Many of these features, such as how tweens are easily resized, saved, swapped or applied, and hard to break are only possible because there is one instance in each tween span. Refer to the Animation Learning Guide for Flash CS4 Professional for a detailed overview of how to use all of these features.

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