"Rewinding" a movie

programming flash
1

I need this 23 frame movie to play…wait a number of seconds, and then play backwards, wait again, and then play forwards. I am having difficulty getting this to work, could someone please enlighten me? much thanks

2

You can’t reverse the play of the playhead.

Now, that might not be entirely true mind you, but I’ve never met anyone who could do it effectively.

If you’re doing something like a loop where you tell the play head to gotoAndStop(_previousFrame);, or something like that… it just doesn’t work well.

Copy the frames, paste them on new layers, and use the “reverse frames” option to flip them around. Then set up gotoAndPlay(); methods to go between the two sets of frames.

This is not optimal mind you. If you’ve already created all sorts of tweens and stuff, they wont translate well when reversed. Or at least I’ve had all sorts of glitchiness when doing those things.

At this point I’ve just learned that this operation is such a pain in the butt that I plan ahead of time now, creating the reverse of the frames at the same time as I’m making the forward set.

Sorry I can’t help more on this.

3

**Mini-Reverse Movie Tutorial:**

Step 1:
If you want our movie to delay about 20 frames after the animation then just add half of those frames to the following layer. In other words make a new layer with 33 blank frames.

Step 2:
Add an empty movie clip to the new layer you just made so that it is present in frames 1-33. Select the movie clip and bring up the actions panel and paste this code.


onClipEvent (load) {
//set frame pointer to the max frames of the
//root timeline
framePointer=_root._totalframes; 
}

onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
//If statement that will be executed
//once 'movie_finish' proves 'true'
if (movie_finish) {
     //set the root timeline on to be 
     //the value of the frame pointer
     _root.gotoAndPlay(framePointer);
     //decrement the frame pointer
     framePointer--;
     //check bounds: after finishing the 
     //reverse animation, start at the last frame 
     //again so we can loop if not than erase the if statement
     if (framePointer <= 0) {
          framePointer = _root._totalframes;
     }
}

Step 3:
On the last frame of he main layer you first started with add a keyframe on frame 33 and add this script:

movie_finish = true;
4

Interesting Dan… I’ll have to look at that more closely.

(never say never)