Ease in/out not intuitive

Question

Hello,
I've been using animation applications for about 20 years now and, for whatever reason, Flash CS5's ease in/out feature has got me stumped.
I have a simple text Movieclip that comes from the left, off stage, and moves to the right onto the stage and stops. I want to ease it so it slows down to a stop.
I'm using Flash CS5 with the new tween.
When I click on the tween in the timeline, the ease property in the Properties Inspector doesn't give me what I want. If I put 100, it comes in and stops hard. If I give it a -100, it slowly accelerates to full speed and then stops suddenly.
I've read the tutorial for the new Motion Editor in Flash and it doesn't work like any other motion editor I've used, including Adobe's own After Effects. Normally, you would just click on the graph's line and then curve it with a pen tool or right-click on select bezier...
Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Hey there,
The property inspector applies ease across the entire tween span, so you're correct that it's not going to give you what you're after. One of the things about the new tweens is it's applying the animation to an entire object, which gives us complexities about trying to do things like ease between property keyframes. We know we need to make this workflow better, and have many ideas around this, hopefully it'll be a reality in a future release soon.
So for now, when easing non-spatial properties (anything other than X, Y, Z), you can use the bezier to adjust the curve. For spatial properties (X, Y, Z) you can switch between smooth and linear curve but not use bezier handles. The reason for this is Flash has stage editing - in order to have both stage editing and control in the graphs, you can either have one or the other. Because Flash users are so accostomed to Stage editing, we went with that and turned of spatial control in the ME (otherwise, Math takes over the handles and you can't really adjust them as you expect). And also because adjusting those curves in the ME rarely gets a user what they're typically after (which is the correct result, technically/mathematically speaking).
Anyway, long story short - if you're doing ease in/out, you may just want to use one of the "Stop and Start" eases, which is an S curve and is ease in and ease out. Just add it to your tween, set the value, and then apply it to the properties you need it on.
Or, you can add a Custom ease and use the bezier controls (keyframes will snap to keyframes in the properties of the tween), and then apply it to your properties.
If you aren't trying to ease a spatial property, you can adjust the curves using beziers, which is a good way of applying ease between keyframes as you note.