This is a strange one… I was working in Flash CS5 the other day and I somehow zoomed in to my timeline frames and couldn’t get them to zoom out. I did some Googling and found lots of people with the same problem, but no solution.
Well, if you’re like me, you use a scroll mouse, where the scroll wheel is actually a clickable middle button. Most 3D modelling programs actually use this middle mouse button, but a lot of programs do not, so it’s easy to forget about it. It turns out that I had accidentally clicked the mouse wheel while I was using it to scroll through the timeline. So, to get it to zoom back out, I had to click and hold the mouse wheel down while scrolling in the timeline.
This seems like one of those weird “features” that Adobe added to Flash even though nobody asked for it. You’re much more likely to do this accidentally while quickly clicking around than you are to ever use this feature. This would be a useful feature on the stage, but it doesn’t work on the stage – just the timeline. Huh?
Overall, though, Flash CS5 is a MASSIVE improvement over CS4. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you should. It’s still a little less stable and a bit slower than CS3, but the workflow improvements are great.
KS
That’s what I thought happened–glad I found this article; I figure out how to work it.
Dato
I was wondering how to zoom it in or out with combinations of alt, ctrl, shift and scroll 🙂 very useful article. i suggest u all to upgrade CS5.5 it has lots of cool updates
Mimi
Thank you! In the middle of a homework assignment for my animation class and I zoomed the timeline!
Hypermiling
Thanks for that – no thanks to Adobe on this one.
Just one of the quirks that really get to me in Flash – just like the lack of holding space to move about the work space and having to hit ctrl and + & – to zoom. Please Adobe, some consistency please!
Fran
thank you!
blargh
Why is there no drop down menu for this!? My scroll wheel is broken and only reads in one direction, I accidentally zoomed in and couldn’t zoom out until I borrowed someone else’s mouse. What were you thinking adobe!??