Thanks for sharing that. I’ve used quite a few of Patrick’s extensions myself — his Pixel Tools are incredible! — and he’s a terrific guy, to boot.

I managed to figure it out.

1) Extensions are needed, I used this one:
http://www.5etdemi.com/blog/archives/2005/07/symbol-swapper-extension/

2) Click the “Edit Multiple Frames” button under the timeline

3) Drag the Onion Skin brackets to the beginning and ending of your animation.

4) On the stage, Shift-Click all of the instances you want to swap (Onion Skin shows the instances of an animation at each keyframe, for those that don’t know about the Onion Skin).

5) In the Library, select the symbol you would like to swap too.

6) From the Menu, select “Commands” then “[ced] Swap Symbols” (the extension that was installed).

And it swaps out all the movie clip instances that were selected.

I hope this is useful for everyone.

Flash CS3 behaves the same way. I wish this was something that could be applied to movie clips and button symbols — but it just ain’t so.

I saw on another one of your posts about this topic that this only works with graphic symbols and not movie clips. You didn’t happen to find a workaround for mc’s did you? This is one of those functionality things that seemingly would be an obvious thing for MM/Adobe to have added by now (maybe in CS3, which I haven’t gotten a hold of yet).

Thanks,

I agree with you on the usability of the Swap feature! I’ve often considered writing some sort of JSFL tool to make things easier. I have no idea when I’ll get around to it.

Ah, don’t feel stupid! I probably wasn’t clear enough in my explanation. The Sync option is a tween option, so you’ll only see it if a motion tween has been applied to the selected keyframes.