Playing a Movie Clip backwards in Flash 8

[Polishwonder74]

I'm having a a hell of a time cracking this problem here. In an amazingly roundabout process, I am making animated 360 degree views of products for my employer's website. If you want to know the specifics, I'll tell you all about it, but in a nutshell I: Build a model in Solidworks, render a 360 degree view in Blender, save it as a quicktime .mov, convert it to a Flash 8 .swf and post it on the web. The process is working surprisingly well.

The trouble I'm having is: Being that I'm trying to make a somewhat interactive product view, the fastest way for me to spin the model is to just play the movie clip and allow the user to pause the movie when he/she wants to have a look at a certain spot. I'd really like to allow the user to play the animation backwards to get to the spot that he/she wants to see quicker. I am a total Flash n00b, and after trying a few tutorials, I still can't get it to work. I can play the MC forward and pause, but I can't play it backwards. I have gotten close, with this method:

(my .fla here: http://www.glottal.com/test/ms110_flash-Large5.fla)

var mTimeline:MovieClip = mAnimation;
btRewind.onPress = function():Void {
mTimeline.onEnterFrame = function():Void {
if(this._currentframe == 1) {
this.gotoAndStop(this._totalframes);
}
else {
this.prevFrame();
}
};
};

But CPU usage goes up to 100% and it bogs down so far that it hardly moves.

Can anyone show me a method that will either play the animation backwards, or back up a number of frames per button press?

Another method I'd love to explore is moving the playhead back and forth by reading click n' drags in the window kind of like those really cool Quicktime sequences that would rotate stuff as the user drags the mouse back and forth.

Thanks for humoring me!

:beer: