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key10reeder
Adobe Employee
key10reeder
Adobe Employee
February 23, 2023
Question

Need Help: Dissecting source .fla files to learn Adobe Animate

  • February 23, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 466 views

I'm trying to learn Animate for purposes of creating HTML5 ads. I'm familiar with Flash from my early days of web design (circa 2002-2007 or so), but I'll need to get back up to speed. To do this, I have a library of existing finalized .fla files created by other people that I've been hoping to open and learn how they were built by observing the source files.

My problem is when I open the .fla files, all of them have nothing in the timeline, even though these are finalized source files that I know are legit. Can anybody tell me why I'm seeing complicated final outputs with HTML and JS files that have scaling, opacity, movement etc., yet the source .flas for those same outputs have almost nothing in them? Most times it's just one layer without any keyframing that says "js".

I've attached screenshots showing that there's almost nothing in the timelines, yet the final exported ads are somehow fully built. Is there some sort of window or UI I'm not clicking into to see the full extent of these animations? I would expect to see lots of keyframing, tweening, overlapping layers etc but there's always seemingly nothing. I feel like I'm missing something. It can't be that all of the motion is happening via actionscripting, can it?

The final animations look as if they've been keyframed and animated, but the source files are seemingly empty. 

Thanks in advance!

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    1 reply

    kglad
    Community Expert
    kgladCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 24, 2023

    what's in the actions panel?  check both include and script tabs

     

     

    key10reeder
    Adobe Employee
    key10reederAuthor
    Adobe Employee
    February 24, 2023

    Thanks for the reply, here's a screenshot of just one of many different .fla files. It looks like it's all scripting, but I would have expected some of the coding to be generated from at least some keyframes and motion rather than 1 frame of actionscripting.  

    JoãoCésar17023019
    Community Expert
    JoãoCésar17023019Community Expert
    Community Expert
    February 24, 2023

    Hi.

     

    Usually HTML5 Canvas documents have the same structure of AS3 documents. Like you said: timelines, layers, frames, symbol instances, tweens, and so on.

     

    But it seems in your case lots of stuff are being created/handled somewhere else. For exemple, the addBG, addCTA, addBranding, addBorder methods only can be coming from the global script section (to the left of the Actions panel), from an external JS file, from an imported publish template or even from the main HTML.

     

    Are you able to tell us from where those methods are coming from?

    Regards,

    JC

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