To mask or not to mask?

[CrazyMerlin]

I am creating a services ad for a site and thought I'd do a timed tab change.
As you will see there is a timer in the bottom right corner, which changes the tab.

What I'm trying to accomplish is to have the background of that timer disappear as the hand sweeps past it...as can be seen in the top right of this swf: http://www.progressivered.com/cu3er/

Any thoughts how I can do the fade?

You can see my tabbed box in action here:
http://vtribes.com/inc/swf/services.html

Thanks for any help/comments.

[TomMalufe]

if you wanted to do this purely on the timeline, then you could cut the circle in 2 halfs and mask each half in turn by rotating the mask.

Personally I would do this effect in code since I'm probably going to want to fire an event at the end anyways. And I could easilly adjust the timer speed that way.

You want an example of how to do that kind of thing with code only?

[CrazyMerlin]

Yes please Tom. I would like to do it purely in AS3 anyway, as the rest of the thing is done that way. I have updated the SWF just now, so almost the only thing left to do is the fading timer.

Thanks for your help.

Paul.