MAC VERSION

JP BEATTIE · Post by **JP BEATTIE** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 6:40 pm

Hello everyone. This is a fantastic forum by the way!
I am currently half way through my AS Pro evaluation period. I'm buying it once my demo has expired, but I'm starting to get worried about the amount of problems being posted concerning MAC OS versions of the software.
I work in design for broadcast television and I've always used macs and don't intend on changing - so is AS Pro a real pain on the mac? Is it to the extent that it'd be better opting for toonboom? I love what i've seen of AS, but not having the render option in the demo, I can't see the main problem which seems to be the export option.

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 6:51 pm

You said a dirty word (ToonBoom), lol, jk. There's an update coming sometime soon that's suppose to be a bug fix release from what I hear. I just emailed efrontier asking about the update yesterday. So I hope to hear something soon.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:57 pm

I use AS on the Mac and don't have problems. The only disadvantage is the use of the batch renderer instead of the normal one, and the QT transparency bug. But since I can work around them, it's OK for now. Of course I expect an upgrade to fix these points.

JP BEATTIE · Post by **JP BEATTIE** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 11:03 pm

What is the Quicktime transparency problem? I intend on doing all my animation in AS and all my compositing and effects in After Effects, so a Quicktime transparency problem would be major for me!

VidE · Post by **VidE** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 6:35 am

Just got AS Pro for the Mac and tried an export of QT Animation - million of color +. While I did get an Alpha channel, the shape was also transparent. Both in Motion and in AE. I would love to hear more from slowtiger on his/her workaround myself. (BTW, this was a quick test, meant to raise concern, not panic.)

Given the UI of the program, I had always assumed its' origins were Mac based. Shows you what I know.

myles · Post by **myles** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:30 am

VidE wrote:Given the UI of the program, I had always assumed its' origins were Mac based.

Originally released as Moho on BeOS.
Its creator and still the main developer, Mike Clifton, developed a C++ based custom GUI that he has since been able to port to Macs, Windows, and Linux - an impressive effort.

I suspect the addition of the predicted support for Unicode in the upcoming bugfix release is a bigger development effort than most people realise.

Regards, Myles.

JP BEATTIE · Post by **JP BEATTIE** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 9:28 am

VidE
Could you do me a favour and check to see if this works, make sure the pre-mutiply alpha isn't selected on the export and see if the shape is still transparent.
Thank you.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 9:30 am

The QT transparency bug:

It seems to vanish if I colour my characters with styles only. I need to create styles first, then create shapes and colour them.

Other workaround: don't export QT movies but a sequence of PNG files. Luckily I have a piece of software which imports this as easily as a QT movie.

JCook · Post by **JCook** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 12:39 pm

I've been using ASP on the Mac since Moho 4. In it's present incarnation, I don't really have any problems with it, except for occasional crashes when rendering. I usually render out an image sequence, so it hasn't been a problem really, just an occasional pain. Otherwise, I find that it works very well on the Mac.

Jack

VidE · Post by **VidE** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:17 pm

JP, turning off 'pre-multiply alpha' in AS Pro seems to eliminate the problem when importing into Motion. So it should work in AE as well.

I only have AE as a windows program. But your suggestion seems to work, and of course, you could always export as .png and import into AE as a still sequence. I didn't try changing the interpretation settings in AE last night either. I'm doing a dual boot on a Macbook, right now I'm in OSX in the middle of an edit project. But if you still need me to, I'll try and switch over to access AE later today and test further.

BTW, I also use the C4D and AE combo, I'd love to see some of your work some time.

JP BEATTIE · Post by **JP BEATTIE** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:28 pm

Hi, thanks for trying that VidE! Not to worry about trying in AE, I'm sure it'll work aswell.
I'll post my work as soon as I've anything nice to show. My work at the minute consists of drawing characters and backgrounds. Until I've bought AS Pro, I won't be able to pull it all together.
I'm working on a pilot project aimed at 8-12 year olds, and also (complete self-indulgence) an animated Indiana Jones fan cartoon! It's just something I've always wanted to do!

spoooze! · Post by **spoooze!** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 8:19 pm

I've been using AS since the Moho days and haven't had any problems except the occasional crash (which, I'm sure, is not uncommon in every version).

robert.hiester · Post by **robert.hiester** » Thu Jul 26, 2007 5:42 am

I use AS5 on my macbook pro. I love it, but it does crash sometimes while exporting to .mov/quicktime. What is up with that?

mooncaine · Post by **mooncaine** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 6:03 am

I'm trying to use it to export what I would think is simple animation, and it's failing miserably and inconsistently. I had it in mind to make some 10 and 15-minute cartoons in Flash. I have one unfinished scene that already has 2053 frames at 24fps.

Sometimes it doesn't export audio. Sometimes, exporting to Flash, it exports a cartoon that stops moving after about 20 seconds, then various layers start to float around on their own. It's crazy. Or it crashes. Or it

I just exported the same animation [the only thing moving so far is Switch layers and one character moved across the screen with layer animation] to QuickTime, and it seems to export to QuickTime fine.

So I'm hoping maybe my boss and our client can handle QuickTime now, embedded in a Flash navigation scheme, instead of Flash, but I'm miserable because I put a lot of front-end work into this on the basis of short tests that suggested ASP would export such a cartoon to Flash, in short chunks of 700 frames or so that could be assembled in Flash. Not so far.

Using MacBook Pro, 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, gobs of free HD space, ASP 5.5.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Sat Jul 28, 2007 7:16 am

I think your problem has more to do with Flash than AS.

It seems to me that 10 to 15 minutes of continuous flash animatiion would require some memory management. Loading and unloading of instances and resources to keep the player from bogging down.

I did do a fairly HUGE production in Flash about a year or so ago and I had to dump instances out of memory using actionscript to keep it running smoothly. I also broke it down into smaller scenes for smoother playback.

I made the same mistake. I assumed my previous experience with shorter simple Flash projects would extend to a very large, longer running project.

This was NOT the case and I paid the price in a lot of frustration. I eventually got it working but I had to learn a lot more about Flash and ITS limitations.

Did you check all the options that can be exported to Flash from AS? Some things aren't optimized and will create large and resource hungry Flash animations.

AS is not Flash. It can export SWF but it is limited. Often the animations produced are frame by frame sequences of unique vector artwork that are much larger than an animation that has been created in Flash or optimized for it.

As for layers floating off strangely or sound not exporting... I have no idea. This could be due to the length of the SWF. Sound in Flash is tricky and doesn't magically stay synced.

You say the QT renders play correctly? This indicates that some of your animation isn't suitable for Flash export.

If you say your original tests with shorter segments worked properly in Flash than you should try using clips of that length and load/unload shorter segments in Flash.

You sound frustrated. I can understand that. I would make sure first you are using both applications correctly. You need to be aware of what will work going from AS to Flash.

-vern

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