Picture-fade to-picture-fade to-picture loop.

[adrianxw]

I have been trying to find a tool which will allow me to make a Picture-fade to-picture-fade to-picture and loop effect. I started with LiveSwif, couldn't get it to work, but learnt a little. I then used the demo versions of Swif 'n Slide, and WonderShare's tool. Whilst these were easy to use, they didn't quite seem to give the right control. So now I am playing with the current demo version of KoolMoves.

I can already see that this is a bigger tool then I probably need for this task, but if I am going to buy something, I'd rather buy something I am going to grow into, rather then something I will quickly grow out of!

I have almost got what I want, but have a problem. I started with an image, then changed it's effcts to fade in and out adding the frames as necessary. I added a blank frame to the end, added the second image and adjusted the effect on that fram in the same manner. Finally I added the last frame and adjusted that in the same way.

What that gave me is the 3 images fading in and out but going all the way to background in between. So I moved the dots to the left on the timeline to get the second to overlap the first, and the third overlap the second.

Now I have the first-fade to-second-fade to-third-fade to-background-fade to-first! I cannot get the last frame to overlap the first frame. I tried to start with the first frame full then fade out, go through the other frames then add the first frame as a "fourth frame" with just the fade in, but it seems to "jerk" or "flicker" between the fade in and the start of the film?

Second question, can I at the same time these images are drifting in and out, add a second time line which drifts a text string across the existing animation?

I suppose I should add, I started fiddling with this just a few days ago and know very little about Flash and animation in general. I am not, however, a computer newbie, I have been a professional software engineer for 25 years - C/C++ and Fortran stuff though, not much web work, and that is vanilla html/css and Perl cgi scripts.