Looping Movies With Flash MX 2004

It has come to my attention from working with Flash MX 2004 Professional that there isn't a quick way to loop a movie a certain amount of times without using action script. To find a better solution and a quick fix for a friend over the week I have come up with the following solution. While this is not the perfect solution to the problem it works and it works well.

When you create your movie be sure that your entire movie is in a   " movie clip "  on your main timeline.   An easy way to do this is to draw a square on a blank frame in your main time line. Then highlight the square and hit F8. This will allow you to change the properties to make the square a movie clip. Now you can double click on your square and it will take you to the movie clip time line of the square. 

Once you have created your animation count the number of frames in the movie clip.  Take the number of frames in the movie clip, then double or triple it depending on how many times you want it to loop on the main time line and add that number of frames to the frame with the movie clip.

Now we are going to add an actions layer and add an extra frame beyond the last frame of the timeline with a stop action.  You may need to add a layer to put anything that you want to have your movie stop with. Like the elements of the last frames of your animation. 

I included 2 pictures to try to help explain  the logic behind this tutorial .

Movie Clip Example 

Main timeline example

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions on this method.