Animation

Motion graphics

Some animation is better worked out than drawn: a logo that pulses, a crowd hopping out of step, a line drawing itself on, a title arriving letter by letter, sparks, a wipe. Phoenix does these for you, frame after frame, from settings you choose in panels. There is no code to write, and nothing is fixed until you want it to be.

Most of it happens in one panel, , which shows what the selection can do.

What you can do

To	Use	On
Move, turn, scale or fade something by itself: wiggle, oscillate, spin, pulse, blink, loop, follow with lag, jiggle	Behaviors	A symbol instance
Make many from one: rings, rows and grids, along a path, scattered in a shape, a crowd out of step	Repeat behaviors, Effector, Stagger	A symbol instance
Sparks, snow, bubbles, confetti	Particles	A symbol instance
Follow another object, a master controller's slider, or the loudness of the soundtrack	Look At, Link to Object, Link to Controller, Follow Sound	A symbol instance
Draw a line on or off; make outlines boil, wave, puff up, round off or repeat	Shape operators	A drawn shape
Bring a title in letter by letter, scramble it, wave it, space it out, color or blur its letters	Letter animators	A text field
Show a layer through the one above it, soft edges and all; blur, color-correct or tint everything below	Track mattes and adjustment layers	A layer
Composite layers through effects, merges, mattes and transforms wired as a graph, seeing each step	Node graphs	A timeline
Make one design serve many names and colors, and render a movie for each row of a spreadsheet	Templates	A symbol
Drive many things from one place: a dial that turns every gear, one color for a whole title	Controls on a null, Link to Control	A symbol instance
Bars and lines that dance to the soundtrack	Audio Spectrum, Audio Waveform	A symbol instance
Slow a graphic or movie clip down, freeze it or run it backwards, blending frames for smooth slow motion	Time Remap	A graphic or movie clip instance
Move something along a path you draw by hand as the movie plays	Motion Sketch	A symbol instance
Marching-ant dashes, tapered brush strokes, gradients along lines; twist or merge shapes	Dashes, Taper, Twist, Merge Paths	A drawn shape
Run words along a curve; flip, blur or change them in; ready-made letter animations	Text on a Path, Flip In, Blur In, Source Text, presets	A text field
Glow, blurs, gradients, noise, ripples, color grading, vignettes, wipes and dissolves	Adjustment effects	An adjustment layer
The same effects on one instance's own picture: an outline round a character, a ripple through one sign	Effects on one instance	A symbol instance
Smear fast motion, leave a trail of earlier poses, or animate on twos	Motion blur, Echo, Posterize Time	A layer
Soften, grow or invert a mask; stencil and silhouette layers	Mask Edge, Layer Mode	A layer
Shade turned 3D cards with lights, cast shadows between them, give them depth; blur what is out of focus	3D lights and depth of field	A movie clip
Stretch a bar to fit a name, pick from lists and checkboxes, keep intros and outros timed	Template fields and fitting	A symbol

Eight orange stars in a ring, each turned to follow the circle — Repeat in a Circle and Pulse.

A fountain of small yellow sparks rising from a point on a dark blue stage — Particles.

Five shapes changed by Bloat, Round Corners, Pucker, Repeater and Offset Path, and text spaced out, colored and blurred more toward its end — Shape operators and a letter animator, each a few settings on art that stays as drawn.

Recipes

A few looks put together from the pieces above, each a minute or two of work:

A neon sign: Put the sign's art under an adjustment layer with Glow, and give the sign's instance Blink with At random ticked and a high rate for a faulty flicker. Or open Add Behavior › Browse Presets... and pick Flicker.
A comet with a trail: Tween a small bright shape across the stage, then on its layer turn on Motion Blur and, from Echo and Posterize Time..., 6 echoes every 2 frames keeping 60%.
Marching ants around a selection: Draw a rectangle with no fill, add the Dashes shape operator, and key its Offset from 0 at the first frame to 100 at the last.
A title that comes into focus: Add Add Animator › Presets › Blur In to the text field; for the whole picture, key an adjustment layer's Blur from 20 to 0.
A rack focus: Push movie clips to different depths with the 3D Translation tool, turn on depth of field in Lights and Depth..., and move the focus by keying the clips' Z, or swap which clip sits at the focus depth.
A music video's bars: Put the song on a layer, draw a bar with its registration point at its bottom, and give it Audio Spectrum; set Laid out to Circle for a ring round a logo.
One dial for a whole machine: Put an Angle Control on a marker, key it, and give each gear Link to Control with its own Amount: 100 for the big gear, -200 for one half its size turning the other way.
A news ticker: A dynamic text field with Source Text keyed to each headline, Slide Up from the letter presets, and a bar behind it pinned with Pin to Text so it fits each one.
Smooth slow motion: On a graphic, add Time Remap, key Frame shown from 1 to 24 over 96 frames, and tick Blend between frames.

How it works

Settings, not keyframes. Each effect has a few settings. Change them and the stage shows the result at once, even while the timeline plays.
Key the settings when they should change over time: the diamond beside a setting keys it on the frame shown, and Phoenix goes smoothly from each key to the next. A Trim Paths End keyed from 0 to 100 draws a line on; a Repeat radius keyed outward opens a ring. See Animate the settings.
Effects add up, top to bottom in the panel's list, and their order matters: a Wiggle after a Repeat wiggles each copy its own way; before it, the whole ring wiggles together.
The same every time. Random effects have a seed, so a scene plays, renders and exports the same on every machine.
Your own behaviors. If something is missing, a behavior is a short JavaScript file; Add Behavior › New Behavior... starts one from an example. See Write your own behavior.

Keep it live, or bake it

Everything here is kept in your document as settings, so you can change it until the end. When you need ordinary animation instead:

Bake in the Behaviors panel, or Modify › Timeline › Bake Behaviors to Keyframes, turns the effects on the selection into keyframes you can edit by hand. Undo brings them back.
Videos, image sequences, GIFs and SWF movies always show the effects as Phoenix draws them.
File › Export › Export FLA for Other Apps writes a copy that other apps opening FLA files play the same way: behaviors and operators as keyframes, templates as symbol copies, mattes as masks, adjustment layers and instance effects as filters, or as bitmaps where no filter will do. See Bake to keyframes.

Learn it step by step

Each part has a short lesson, inside Phoenix under Help › Tutorials... and as a page here:

AI assistants can set all of this up too; see AI assistants.