flash actionscript: And so far as I can tell really has no reason or rhyme. I've set up many masks
using this exact same process before, and I can not figure out what's causing
the issue.

Working in Flash 8 Professional.

I've got a movie clip with a graphic in it, and another movie clip with a
series of animated graphic symbols in it- I'm using setMask to create the mask
with these two pieces. Where the animated graphics overlap each other, the mask
is being cancelled out. Normally I have no problem doing this with multiple
pieces, and the mask stays one solid piece (I have created masks identical to
this many times).

To make things odder, the first two or three pieces in don't show cancellation
where they overlap- it's only the pieces that come in later on that do it.

I've checked that none of the symbols have highlighted pieces, as suggested in
another thread in this forum.

The only thing I can think of is that these vector shapes in the graphics were
created in Illustrator, not in Flash. Is this a possibility?

You can see the Flash movie at the link below - the problem is with the second
"Cloud" mask. It's a large file because this is meant as a screensaver, not for
web.

http://www.audreyportfolio.com/showandtell/BSDscreensaver.swf

Thanks in advance for any help you might offer.

I think you must have misunderstood me- I only had the masking movieclip
masking one movieclip- the mask movieclip contained multiple graphic instances
that were animated.

Any rate, I ended up deleting the layers that seemed to have the "overlap"
look problem, and re-created and animated them- this seemed to fix the problem.

Seems like quite the bug!

I understood you perfectly. The fix would have been simple I think. You take
the animation layers (2 of them from what you said) and put them inside a
single mc. This would then be applied using setMask to the underlying picture.
I believe my statement above said that.

Sorry, I must not have been clear. The setup you just described is exactly the
setup I had going first time around.

It's fixed now- all I needed to do was delete, recreate, and reanimate a few
of the graphic symbols, each on their own layer, inside of the movieclip that
was to be my mask. I've read in other locations on other forums that there is
occasionally a bug with masks that causes this "cancellation" effect.

I figured out how to fix it in my case. It's simple enough... I had
cacheAsBitmap set for both my mask and the movieclip i was masking, and that
worked how it should, but with the redraw problems I was talking about. The
mask and content were contained inside another movieclip, so I enabled
cacheAsBitmap on their parent movieclip, and it took away the redraw problems.

Thank you!