Scrubbing different areas of the timeline.

Question

This is a branch from an earlier thread here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4752554#4752554#4752554 Thank you so much for making this available for me to use.
In the thread, a way was created to scrub through an edge timeline. I was wondering, is there a way to scrub through five different symbol animations? I have five objects lined up from left to right, and when you touch one it scales full screen and starts the object's animation. You can scrub the video back and forth for each separately. I'm just starting to understand what each part of the code does. I can make it work with one animation, but I haven't been able to get it for all five yet.
Also, some smaller things. Is it possible to make the scrubber automatically move down the bar as the symbol plays from the beginning? Right now it stays still until I touch it, than I can scrub.
Thanks,
Jackson

Answer 1

Hi Jacksonean,
Yes, you can scrub through multiple different timelines with different scrubbers. There are several ways to do this. One way would be: on press/drag of each scrubber, filter the event through a switch statement and based on the scrubber ID, control the relevant timeline.
And yes, you can make the scrubber move as the timeline plays as well. Start a setInterval timer when the timeline plays, and set the x (css left) position of the scrubber based on the current frame label divided by total frames of the playing timeline. When the timeline stops playing, be sure to clear the setInterval!
Quasi-code, to put on Stage.compositionReady event:
(you will need to run this "currentScrubPosition" var through a custom utility function (getTranslation) to get the actual position to place the scrubber, relative to it's min and max x positions)
// you'll need to set up vars for all 5 of your timelines/scrubbers
var minInput1 = 0; // start of timeline
var maxInput1 = sym.getSymbol("my_timeline1").getDuration(); // duration of timeline
var minOutput1 = 100; // left most constraint of scrubber
var maxOutput1 = 500; // right most constraint of scrubber
// when timeline starts playing, run setInterval, with the code below in it (what out for scope issues!)
var tempScrubPosition = sym.getSymbol("my_timeline1").getPosition()/sym.getSymbol("my_timeline1").getDuration();
var translatedScrubPosition = getTranslation(minInput1, maxInput1, minOutput1, maxOutput1, tempScrubPosition);
function getTranslation(minInput, maxInput, minOutput, maxOutput, inputNumber) {
     var translatedVal = ((inputNumber - minInput) * (maxOutput - minOutput)/(maxInput - minInput) ) + minOutput;
     return translatedVal;