Frames and Keyframes

All animation is made up of frames. Small changes on each frame, when played back at speed (such as 12 or 24 frames per second) give the eye the illusion of motion.

As you saw when exploring the Timeline interface, Flash utilizes both frames and keyframes. A keyframe is a frame in which you define a change in an animation or include frame actions to modify a movie.

Frames work in conjunction with layers to create animation. You can think of each layer of your movie as a separate slideshow, and the movie itself as the set of all of the layers playing simultaneously.

Each layer in your movie has its own set of frames. You can have as many keyframes per layer as you want. A layer in which every frame is defined as a keyframe is basically the same thing as a frame-by-frame animation.

The following images demonstrate how the circle looks at each keyframe.