Macromedia Flash – Introducing Layers and the Timeline

The Timeline panel is above the Stage. The Timeline helps you organize assets in your document, and also controls a document’s content over time. To help control content, the Timeline contains layers and frames. Flash documents can play over a length of time, like movies or sound, which is measured using frames. Layers are like transparencies that stack on top of one another; each layer can contain images, text, or animations that appear on the Stage. You’ll learn more about frames and the Timeline in Part 2 of this tutorial.

The FLA document you’re working on has one layer (Layer 1) with contents on a single frame (Frame 1). This is the default way that a Flash document opens.

In this exercise, you lock and rename Layer 1. Often you’ll want to place objects in a particular position on the Stage. To help you keep those objects in place, Flash enables you to lock layers so you cannot select the items on a layer and accidentally move them.

1. Select Layer 1 in the Timeline and click the dot below the lock icon, as shown in Figure 8.

   

   Figure 8. Lock a layer so its contents aren’t accidentally moved or deleted from the Stage. You can also prevent inadvertently adding other assets to that layer.

   

   With your only layer locked, you need to add new layers before you can add any other objects to the Stage. You cannot add new objects to a locked layer.

2. Select the Selection tool in the Tools panel and double-click the name Layer 1.

   When you double-click a layer name, you can modify the name.

3. Type background into the layer name to rename the layer, and save your file.

   When you start building projects with many layers, layer names like Layer 1 and Layer 14 don’t help you determine what’s on that layer. Giving layers a descriptive name is a good practice to adopt.

Tip: You can also organize layers into layer folders. For more information, do a search on “layer folders” in the Help panel (F1).