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I work on a truckload of flash banners and have progressed more into dispatching events from the final frame of a MovieClip that would contain an object (or collection of closely related objects) animating and then listening for them from the parent timeline so that I know when to continue the main animation etc.

In the animation I'm working on currently, there's a car built from blocks over time (the blocks fall from the top of the banner to make up the car); this is all contained within one MovieClip (to make the resizing easier - all I'll have to do is move the entire MovieClip around).

The problem is that when I place this MovieClip onto the timeline, it's represented by its first frame (which is nothing because no blocks have fallen yet). This makes it hard to work with because I can't really tell exactly where the car is going to be when the animation is done and so on.

Is there a way to have the final frame of this MovieClip visible from the outer timeline?

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3 Answers

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My completely manual way of dealing with this is to put a placeholder graphic on the first frame and some code to skip that first frame when actually playing. It's not perfect but it does the job rather well.

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Was afraid there wouldn't be a setting for this or something else; I do the reference graphic too however it's annoying.. Well thanks for the tip. –  Marty Jun 9 '11 at 10:35
Another option is to set the MovieClip to be a Graphic instead, that will mess up your code, but it will respect the main timeline moving, however, reading your question it seems that you may not even be playing the main timeline at all. –  grapefrukt Jun 9 '11 at 10:38
Consider my scenario one similar to this: The main timeline animates some text appearing and disappearing, then animates in a car then stops. The timeline in the car handles the animation of the car being built, and when it reaches the end of its timeline it stops and plays the parent timeline again. –  Marty Jun 9 '11 at 10:41
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movieClip.gotoAndStop(movieClip.totalFrames - 1)

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Sorry, what I mean is that I want to see the final frame while I'm working in the Flash IDE to create my animation. Also this would stop on the second last frame (frames start at 1 not 0). –  Marty Jun 9 '11 at 4:41
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This can't be done. My advice is, if u need some visual reference to the last frame of desired animation, make a screenshot of that animation frame, and use screenshot as temporary background for new animation. That's the best way to see where other elements are positioned.

Or if you can, u can duplicate that animation and delete all frames beside last one, and use this duplicated animation for reference.

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