I took a class a few years ago on computers and I was pretty good at doing the basics in Macromedia Flash. I just downloaded a 30-day-trial. Now I’m really rusty and I’m having a hard time with tweens. I can get a shape (like a circle or something) to change color or change shape with the different motion and shape tweens, but I cannot get text to do the same thing! What am I missing?
This is what I have been doing:
Put the text in the original frame. Make the text color black.
Put in another key frame. Make the same text now the color white.
Put in a motion tween.
The arrow connects, but when I play it, the text stays black until the second keyframe and then jumps to white. As you could probably tell, I’m trying to do the whole fading text thing but it just won’t work. Agh. Please help me someone, this is really frustrating me!
Ya can’t do what you’re trying to do. You have to convert that text into a symbol of some sort, probably a graphic. Try this:
Type your text. Select it using the arrow tool. Press F8 to convert it into a graphic symbol. Name it something you can remember.
Add your second keyframe wherever you’d like it to be.
In your Symbol Effect palette (or something similar… sorry, Flash isn’t on this computer, so it’s from memory), you can change either the color (black to white) or alpha (which sounds more like what you want to do, making it 0%).
Oh, or the easier way would be to break that text down into basic shapes and do a shape tween on those. After you type your text, select it with the arrow tool and hit either apple+enter or ctrl+enter on a PC. That should break apart the text. Now a shape tween will work, but may give you unexpected and weird results.