I work on a truckload of flash banners and have progressed more into dispatching events from the final frame of a MovieClip that would contain an object (or collection of closely related objects) animating and then listening for them from the parent timeline so that I know when to continue the main animation etc.
In the animation I'm working on currently, there's a car built from blocks over time (the blocks fall from the top of the banner to make up the car); this is all contained within one MovieClip (to make the resizing easier - all I'll have to do is move the entire MovieClip around).
The problem is that when I place this MovieClip onto the timeline, it's represented by its first frame (which is nothing because no blocks have fallen yet). This makes it hard to work with because I can't really tell exactly where the car is going to be when the animation is done and so on.
Is there a way to have the final frame of this MovieClip visible from the outer timeline?
My completely manual way of dealing with this is to put a placeholder graphic on the first frame and some code to skip that first frame when actually playing. It's not perfect but it does the job rather well.