opacity on animate

Lets see if I can help. : ) To help me explain I'm gonna use some really basic art. . . two overlapping brown ovals!

If you want everything on a layer to be 50% transparent probably the easiest solution is:

• Select everything on that layer
• Hit F8 to convert everything to a Symbol
• Name the symbol whatever you want, and click [OK]
• With the symbol selected go to the Properties panel
  • Go to Color Effect, and select Style: Alpha
    
  • Set the alpha to 50%
    
    

Now everything on that layer should be 50% transparent. 🙂

However you might get a visual error where two objects are overlapping eachother, and the overlapping section is more opaque, like this:

To fix this:

• Select the symbol and go to the Properties panel
  • Go to Display, and select Blending: Layer
  • next select Render: Original (No Change) 

Now when you export the image it will look like this:*

*Nope, this doesn't work any more. .. Is this a bug? : (

Sigh-* let's do a work-around:

To really fix this:

• Select the symbol and go to the Properties panel
  • Go to Filters, and select Color Adjustment
    

Now your symbol will look like this! No gross overlapping alphas.

Hope this helps!

Layer opacity is a feature like outline view, that only exists in the editor. It's working as designed.