Animation rendered to SWF gone weird! Quicktime render OK!

[nickharambee]

Hi

I have a fairly lengthy animation that I am working on in ASP 6. It's about 5 minutes long at 25 FPS so around 8000 frames. From looking around on this forum it would seem that this is rather excessive amount of frames, and that really i should be creating scenes and then joining them together, perhaps in Flash CS4.

The reason I mention this is that all of a sudden very weird things are happening in my SWF file rendered using ASP. Layers are looping that shouldn't be looping and various parts of my character disappear and appear in strange places.

As far as I am aware I am not using anything that SWF doesn't like. Here are the effects I am using - bone manipulation, bone lengthening/shortening, and various PNG layers with different opacity settings. I am also using one MP3 file.

When I try to export the animation in smaller sections, the sections look OK, suggesting that it is the length of the animation I am trying to render that is the problem.

But I would rather avoid trying to stitch together the animation in Flash CS4 as it often crashes when I try to import SWF files created in ASP to the stage.

I would be grateful for any help in following the optimal procedure. I want to render my animation as SWF to keep the file size down as it will be used on my home page - yes a long animation for a home page, but there you go

Nick

[DK]

As far as I am aware I am not using anything that SWF doesn't like. Here are the effects I am using - bone manipulation, bone lengthening/shortening, and various PNG layers with different opacity settings.

If you're using PNG's, AS does not support any raster based image output to .swf only vectors.

EDIT: I stand corrected. AS does export some raster based formats to sfw but not if they have been warped by bones or image layers that use progressive JPEG images.

Cheers
D.K

[jahnocli]

If you're using PNG's, AS does not support any raster based image output to .swf only vectors.

That's not strictly true. You can export bitmaps to SWF format as long as you do not try to manipulate them with bones.

[slowtiger]

I've experienced similar strange things when I exported a longer animation to SWF , there was 1 duplicate character which I had to erase from every single frame ... of about 1500.

But may I comment on your workflow? You say it's going to end on your homepage - a 5 min long animation? This length shouldn't be a problem nowadays, most would do this on video, with a file size roughly around 100 MB.

If you're really after keeping the file size down, just using SWF is only one part of the solution. In my project I had very strict size limits, so I ended up in animating with 12 fps, and I was erasing every other frame in Flash where the movement was slow, and I kept the character optimized for Flash, meaning it moved like a cutout.

Bone length changes make the little red dot disappear - meaning that for every key Flash creates a new symbol.

[DK]

jahnolci.

I just tried imported a bmp into AS6.1 and exported an swf file and got nothing in the swf file at all?

Cheers
D.K

[slowtiger]

DK, I think you need to use a bitmap file format which Flash understands: JPG, PNG or GIF.

[DK]

Ahh...yes you're right. You can export jpg etc. I was trying to export an actual bmp. It's when you try to warp the images with bones they won't export.

Thanks
D.K