So I’m ready to do a public release of my latest Flash extension, the “Duplicate Frames Remover” (or DupeFrameRemover for short) extension. In order to get a feel for what it does, and before you download it to expand your repetiore of Flash commands, let me talk for just a moment about the problems this Flash doo-dad solves.

Extra keyframes are not uncommon. I’ve worked with a lot of Flash animators and developers on litterally hundreds of projects over the course of the last decade, and I’d be lucky if more than 2% of all the FLA’s I opened up didn’t have half a dozen or more unneccessary keyframes. These little additions to your timeline might seem harmless, but when you open up an FLA that you need to make an edit on, your mind needs to take a moment to assess what each and every keyframe is doing. Have you ever looked at a timeline– even one of your own Flash animations– just to stare at it and wonder what the hell you were doing?

I’m a neat freak. I like speed and efficiency (thus the massive compulsion to create expansions to the Flash authoring environment). I’m not fond of killing even a minute of my time staring at a keyframe to understand it’s place in the animation I’m looking at, only to discover that the keyframe is an unneccessary extra. That is to say, if it didn’t exist, nothing about the animation would change. It is a worthless extra that clutters the view and slows me down.

I would ask my designers to clean up their timelines for this very reason, but sometimes it’s too tedious a task to be worth the effort. Well, not any more. This Flash CS3 Extension does it for you. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time and I finally built it. This JSFL command removes all unneccessary duplicate keyframes from the currently selected timeline, and I’m not just talking about blank keyframes. I’m talking about ALL keyframes, whether the keyframe is in the midst of a shape or motion tween or not.

To run the command, simply select the layers you want to remove duplicates from, choose the FlashWhip DupeFramesRemover option from the commands menu, and bam– it remove all the un-needed additional keyframes. I’ve tested it a bit and it works quite well, only removing extras. When your done, your timeline looks much cleaner, is way easier to understand, and yet runs exactly the same.

This command is very careful not to remove a keyframe if it would change an animation in any way. It looks at every aspect of the keyframe down to the filter settings of any instance, instance names — it even examines the tween sequences and the frame labels, sounds, and actionscript. If it compares text, it compares the text formatting as well.

There are TWO EXCEPTIONS TO BE AWARE OF:

• ActionScript: The Flash Extension doesn’t treat identical frames with identical actionscript on them as duplicates. This is because it doesn’t assume to know the intentions of the programmer. Often one might find a sequence of blank keyframes containing identical “stop();” scripts, for example. (When examing Flash keyframe code for duplicates I thought it a bad idea to just wing it.)
• Sounds: In addition, the two identical frames with identical sounds are not seen as extras. This is because the extension considers the fact that you might have several identical sounds played back to back on the same layer.

That said, knock yerselves out. The new expansion to the my JSFL collection is available on the free Flash extensions page.