I use to hate doing motion tweens etc. If possible and given how much time it would take, I write a lot of motion with actionscript. I use to get annoyed with tweening because if I needed to pause an animation so something like text that came up on screen could be read, I would drag the timeline out to create that delay so the text could be read. As well, if you are doing a project for a company, they will typically say things like, "that is a second too long... can we have it show for 2 seconds more..." etc. Well I usually run flash at 30 to 40 frames per second, so i could drag the timeline to estimate how much time I took off, things would get messed up, keyframes out of whack and a lot of time eaten. Wouldn't it be simpler if I was working with real seconds and didn't take up any timeline space when there was no animation..... YES it would be.

It is real simple. Create a blank keyframe where your animation would stop so someone could read or whatever the case may be. Instead of dragging out keyframes with no motion to create a delay in animation, do the following in the blank keyframe you created.
//================
function go(){
clearKeyfram("it");
play();
}
var it = setInterval(go,5000);
stop();
//===================

setInterval creates a timed process in miliseconds. It is not based on frames, the time runs independent of your frames. so the 5000 is 5 seconds. Once it hits that 5 seconds, it runst the go function which clears the interval to make sure it doesnt run the function again after another 5 seconds. It then tells the timeline to play. You could target a movieclip outside of the timeline like _parent.ball.gotoAndPlay("bounce"); or whatever you want to happen after five seconds.

I created a component, a very simple one where i just tell it how long to delay the timeline for and then drop it on the stage. I of course made sure to add a this._visible = false; so that it would not be seen during playback.

Now all the timeline will only need to be spanned out to create transition effects with your movies.