The first impression I had when I saw the new motion tweening in Flash CS4 was a face-value assessment: there was a new animation concept inside Flash. I quickly realized, however, there was more to it than that. In this article, I hope to convey something like National Geographic’s slogan, “Think Again,” in regards to motion tweening.

The changes in Flash’s motion tweening are the effect of two changes in Adobe Flash CS4. The first change is in the new interface. There is a new location for the panels and a different arrangement for the properties related to motion tweening. The second change is the new concept of animation itself in Flash CS4. This concept is imported from other Adobe video products, such as Adobe After Effects. The new animation concept is built on two facts:

* The symbol follows an animation path. This path starts with the first keyframe in the animation (the start of the animation) and ends with the last keyframe in the animation (the end of the animation). This path can be manipulated as if it were a stroke or a symbol.
* The keyframe concept has changed slightly from the previous version of Flash. The old keyframe concept requires you to add keyframes manually when indicating a change in the symbol. Old-style motion tweening is now called classic tweening. The keyframe used in the new motion tweening concept is created automatically when you create a change in the symbol. This happens after you apply motion tweening to the symbol.

In this article, we will show examples of how to create and work with the new tweening concept in Flash CS4.

Read the rest of my free article here.