Movie clips not playing

[Timmonsxp]

Hi I know this is probably is simple as it gets but I have a question about movie clips. I was wondering if movie clips can play if the movie clip is in one keyframe. Or does it have to be as many key frames as the Movie clips length. For instance.

On the layers Intro and SlowMov. I have movie clips inside those frames. They have a lot of frames inside the movieclips to show my animations. When I click CTRL+Enter to test it out. it completely skips both of the entire movie clips and moves onto the giant mess of frames and tweens you see above. I am trying to figure out the method of how to use movie clips correctly so my timeline doesn't look more ridiculous than it already is. Do i really need to insert the total number of frames for each Movie clip. Like on Intro I have one keyframe with its movieclip. Lets say the clip is 100 frames. Do i need to F5 at 100 in the main timeline to get it to play. That seems like a nuisance..please help!

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

The movieclip doesn't exist on frame 4. It needs to exist for you to see it. Just extend it to the last frame where you need it to be seen.

[Timmonsxp]

I don't have a movie clip on frame 4. I have movie clips on frames 1 and 3. 4 is an animation played out on the main timeline. I didn't put it into a movie clip.

[Colin Holgate]

That's what I said, the movieclip doesn't exist on frame 4. If you want to see the movieclips on frame 1 and 3 continue to play, they should be extended along the timeline to the frame where you want to stop seeing them.

[ClayUUID]

Put a stop(); statement in the root timeline where you want it to stop while the movieclip animation plays.

In the last frame of the movieclip, put:

stop();

MovieClip(parent).play();

[Timmonsxp]

Okay so to make sure that I'm not confusing myself or anyone haha. I'll try to explain more in depth so I can understand what your saying. I redid the timeline so I can explain what I want to do with it.

As I stated before on the Layers "Intro" and "SlowMov" I have movie clips. For the movie clip "intro" It's 445 frames long in its movieclip timeline. Are you saying that I need to extend "Intro" 445 frames into my main timeline. The way I have it set up and want it to play is. Intro plays its full movie clip of 445 frames. Its set on frame 1. once the 445 frames of intro are done I want it to move to frame 2 which has another movie clip with 100 frames. Do i have to extend the movie clip layers to match and equal the number of frames residing inside its movie clip. Or can a movie clip play using a single frame like I have it here?

[Colin Holgate]

What Clay was saying would work then. Put stop(); in frame 1 and in frame 2 of the timeline you showed. You can make frame 2 of the Actions layer be a keyframe too, so that you have two consecutive frames with actions in them, both of which are: stop();

In the last frame of the Intro movieclip, and in the last frame of the SlowMov movieclip, put the script Clay mentions, into a keyframe:

MovieClip(parent).play();

That should then do everything you want. If you later want to add a Skip button to either of those, and you put the Skip button in the main timeline, it only has to gotoAndPlay the next frame. This would work if the Skip button was named 'skipbtn' (this would be in frame 1 of the main timeline):

skipbtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,skip);

function skip(e:MouseEvent){

gotoAndPlay(currentFrame+1);

}

[Timmonsxp]

Wow thanks a lot Colin and ClayUUID. Im still pretty new so I didn't know the code to use. I was pretty sure you could use one frame though for a giant move clip or else your timeline could stretch to ridiculous numbers and navigating it would be dreadful. Thanks for the help you two. I'll definitely remember this code.