Animation frames gone wild...

[Tallis]

I had a simple dozen animation frames in a tiny website design. I wanted to insert extra pages in the middle, so I named them ( inserting after frame 3 ) Frame 3a, Frame 3b, Frame 3c because they had to go between frame 3 and frame 4. The rest of the frame names were in regular number succession.

Later, I designed a navigation system and started using the webaddress... dialog. Instead of buttons, I had simple numbers to designate pages on the navigation bar. This saves space and makes things look less like it was designed in the 90's....

Of course, I started to have to map button 4 to frame 3a, button 5 to frame 3b, etc. Needless to say, it gets convoluded if the site ( or animation in general) gets bigger.

Is there any way to rename the frame names by number, en masse? What is the going "state of the art" way to organize and name large numbers of frames in an animation. Not like I'm getting there next week, but I'm quickly realizing I better learn it early before I have 50-100 frames of chaos later...

Thanks for any ideas....

[WolfMoonHP]

I have no idea, but I frequently have the same problem and will be eagerly looking forward to finding out if there is an easy solution!
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Will

[jamesmc]

I think that's why the Xara people said that Xtreme Pro was for simple animation and it also doesn't have a timeline.

Timelines and the various and sundry tools that go with them, including draggable tree branches of timelines and complex script routines are found in Macromedia Flash and other applications like Swish.

Some Video editors such that Adobe offers are also capable of using flash as overlays in which they can be masked, abridged and generally filtered in a variety of ways.

I suppose one could have a second copy of Xara open and make their own pseudo timeline, but it would be for organizing purposes and not functional. One could even make a tree showing what layers were involved in breaking down the various functions (move, resize, etc.)