Nobody in the TVP team said it's not possible
. Thanks for the reply Fabrice! And I'm sorry to be such a pest. I of course love the software like everyone else, and just want to see it do all sorts of things. Really, the development of 9.5 is just incredible from my standpoint, and as close to true magic as one can get, and I thank you guys for the opportunity to contribute in any small way. I have just lately felt the need to vigorously defend my position, because I believe so strongly in this one feature. I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record.
@NickA -Thanks for the explanation. I can see your frustration about symbol use in flash, and going inside the symbol and losing contact with the main timeline. However, it's easily explained like this. Imagine you have an animbrush that could sit by itself on the stage. Imagine that it also has that easy transformation box, with a size / rotate / scale widget. Now imagine the ability to set easy keyframes without having to go into the fx panel. That's it! that's a symbol. Multiple frames of animation encapsulated inside a little container. In other words.. very similar to an animbrush, but with those controls, and it's own timeline.
The things that confuse most people about symbols in Flash include some of the things you mentioned: Double clicking a symbol that contains one or more frames of animation, takes you off of the main timeline into edit mode, where you're editing the frames of that symbol. Pretty handy actually. The main stage, and everything on it's multiple layers that isn't your symbol, becomes greyed out, so that you know you're only editing your symbol. The confusing thing is, that both things are displayed at once! Sort of like an onion skin. This is still useful though, because it lets you reference the place in the main timeline that you left, before going in to edit a symbol. Here's a detailed example:
Let's say you have a character that is wearing a hat. The hat has it's own separate bit of animation to it, say 15 frames of a bounce up and down. This bit of animation is inside a symbol and is on it's own layer. Now, in your main timeline, on layer two, let's say you have another symbol. This one contains 15 frames of a hand drawn character walking, with a bit of a bounce. Using symbols on the main timeline, it's easy to just adjust the size, rotation or placement of the hat symbol, and make it's animation match the animation of the body / character on layer 2. Don't like the color of the hat? Easy. Double click the symbol, anywhere it exists on the timeline, and start editing your color. Jump back out to the main timeline and play it... you're done. Symbols are useful for all kinds of things, and you can have symbols within symbols, for all kinds of dynamic effects. Let's say you animate a fly zipping around the screen. Got that motion perfect? Great.. let's say it's 30 frames of a fly buzzing around. Well, it's easy to copy that symbol, paste it down again and make a 2nd fly. rotate it, re-scale it, and move it.. maybe add a third, and a fourth. Get the idea? The real power comes in, when you select all of those symbols, that contain all those frames of animation, and place them all.. inside another symbol! You can then tween that large group all over the stage, scaling and rotating as you please, never having to render or bake anything into the scene. This ultimate flexibility and unique ability quite literally caused a gigantic revolution in 2D animation, and I believe it to be an essential core functionality of any modern 2d animation software. TVP partially already does this with clips, the keyframer, and the animbrush.. just not quite in the same fashion.
Now currently, this all being done with vector graphics, this object orientated system of nested animation and easy transformations is all possible due to the fact that vector graphics take up much, much less data / memory than bitmap / raster graphics. So, this is some of the concern that a fully realized object based symbol type system, just wouldn't be feasible in TVP. They're literally two horses of a different color, memory wise.
Thanks for listening, and to Peter, Asaf, and others, my apology for the rough tone of my earlier messages. You're all artists and peers whose artwork and opinions I do respect and admire, so I'm sorry to have gotten an bit flustered and frustrated through my long and probably tedious explanations.
On to the V10!
Best,
C
Everybody is free here to give his opinions. And as I told before : Why not? It's not a bad idea =)
