Countdown timer

Hello to you all

I have a question about flash 8.
I am making flash countdown timers for my website.
When I use a png-picture,which I make myself in PSP then I have no problems.
But when I use a gif-animation something goes wrong.
The animation does not show the numbers properly.It flashes.
The gif-aniamtion has 29 frames but in the layer actionscript I don't see the frames.
Is there someting else I need to do to maken it work properly?? I tried evrything,including extra layers but it just don't work.
Hope you can advise me?
Thank you so far.
Grz Sonja