The two most common symbol types in Adobe Animate are Graphic symbols and MovieClip symbols. They are alike in many ways – but there are stark differences as well.
The two most common symbol types in Animate are graphic symbols and movie clip symbols.
They are alike in many ways, but there are stark differences as well.
Let's have a look.
Here we can see a little koala with a sword,
Identifying graphic symbols and movie clip symbols
and it seems that they are double.
However, this one here is a Movie Clip symbol instance which we can tell by selecting it and then looking in the Properties panel to see Movie Clip, and then here we have a Graphic symbol instance.
Let's look within each symbol.
So, going into the Movie Clip symbol,
Comparing internal timelines and animation behavior
we can see the animation here.
It takes up 40 frames of animation.
Going back to Scene 1 and entering the graphic symbol, we can see identical animation for the graphic symbol covering 40 frames of animation.
Going back to Scene 1, let's have a look at the difference when scrubbing along the Timeline.
Understanding timeline playback and testing differences
All right, so we can see that the graphic symbol does move along the Timeline and animate as we scrub.
However, the movie clip symbol does not.
That's because movie clip symbols have their own independent Timeline whereas graphic symbols have each frame of their internal Timeline bound directly to the main Timeline.
So, when we go to one second of animation or 24 frames of the graphic symbol, we can see the exact position and animation frames of the internal graphic symbol Timeline.
However, again, the movie clip symbol remains static.
In order to see any changes within a movie clip symbols Timeline, we would need to test by going Control, Test.
And here we can see it play out.
Controlling symbols with code and playback options
Another difference is that a movie clip symbol instance can be given an instance name.
So perhaps I'll call this koala, this allows us to control different aspects and properties of this movie clip symbol instance with code.
If I choose my graphic symbol, you can see that we do not have the ability to give it an instance name because graphic symbols can not be controlled by code.
However, you can control graphic symbols through this Looping option here.
Or you can choose to Loop, Play Once, use a Single Frame, and then determine what the First frame is and even use something like the Frame Picker to choose any of the available frames.
Movie clip symbols on the other hand do not have this option
Feature differences between graphic and movie clip symbols
though they do have the ability to use Filters, Color Effects and so on.
What you learned:
Understand the difference between Graphic and MovieClip symbols
See how scrubbing the Timeline moves Graphic symbols but not MovieClip symbols
Change looping options for Graphic symbols using the Frame Picker and other tools
Apply filters and color effects to a MovieClip symbol
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