Hey, any flash gurus out there?

I'm trying to deviate from my normal strait up frame by frame animation and use tweening (WELL... not like NG). I've been using the pen tool and I want to tween a path.
From what I've been able to tell, you do like you would for a normal tween (a section of normal frames followed by a key frame), draw the end result in the last key frame and the initial in the starting key frame, then select shape tween.

the unfortunate part is the shape gets fucked. I've tried using animation hints (modify->shape or ctrl-shift-h or something. anyways, i've tried animating two things in the file, it worked beautifully for one... and initially beautifully for the other, then suddenly it stopped paying atention some of the hints for the other. All I'm doing is moving a few control points around, but it keeps on fucking it up.

any ideas? or is shape tweening just shit, even when using hints?


Are there any other ways to animate the control points of a path?

while I'm at it: I have a doughnut like shape. there is something under it that I want only to be visable through the hole in the doughnut, but I move it around so that sometimes the doughnut can't hide it all.
I want to use a mask, but the hole of the doughnut keeps changing shape so I cant use a standard mask, and flash seems to freak out when I try to make a complex shape using the pen tool for a mask. any ideas? Is there any way to link two objects on differnt layers to move together (for example, if i change the shape of the hole in the doughnut, i want the shape of the mask to change too)?


Hope someone knows how to do this stuff lol.