Moho Forum

I still get the same maddening, puzzling crash, seemingly at random, but more often than random:

I have a 777 frame animation with a WAV, 16-bit, 44.1kHz soundtrack, and two stationary characters. Only the Switch layer in each char is animated, using a file exported from Papagayo.

I already saw a tip here about crashes during audio export, and following that tip, I put an MP3 version of the same WAV in the same folder as the WAV. I thought that helped the crashes, but obviously not.

More often than not [WAY more often], Anime Studio Pro crashes during Flash export. Sometimes, it works, and I can't tell why. I've tried renaming files, tried different soundtracks, and I tried renaming the second char's Switch layer to "Mouth 2", in case the 2 layers with identical names caused probs.

I've unchecked all the boxes in the Flash export dialog.

Using ASP 5.5, Build 20060829, downloaded & registered yesterday.

Mac OSX 10.4.8.

Any tips or suggestions? Is this perhaps a known problem? It's been happening to me on those rare occasions when I used Moho, and since the change to ASP, the same crash is still happening.

I posted this in the Bug Reports forum, but I need help, so I'm looking for suggestions here. I wouldn't expect many readers to be checking the bugs forum looking for questions to answer.

Flash export hates too many frames. A good way of getting around this problem is to export in staggered amount of 50 (or in extreme cases, 25) frames at a time. So you would export::

1-50
51-100
101-150

etc until you get to your desired amount of frames.

You're going to need a Flash program to stick it all back together. There must be a free one out there somewhere, but i know of none (because i don't really hunt for it), sorry.

Hope this helps

Cribble, thanks for the suggestion! Luckily for me, all this is for work -- they bought the software, and they provide the Flash, too, so I'll be able to do the assembly in Flash, I'm sure.

I could cut the frame rate in half, but I found that working with Papagayo at 12fps was maddening in its own way, with lots of 1- and 2-frame words that refused to let me drag their edges to resize them, even zoomed in as far as Papa would let me.... I planned to do a test animation at 24 fps, and see if that would suit the client. Meanwhile I'd test the results of taking ASP's 24fps output down to 12fps in Flash, if that's possible [it's been a few years since I really worked with Flash]. I will also test what happens if I animate at 24fps in ASP, then set it to 12fps.

Have you tried taking out the sound file for export, then re-introducing it in Flash? If it's all synced up, shouldn't be too much hassle. Occasionally I have to do this...

Also another idea to try is using the 'batch render' option(File-Batch Render or apple+b). I ran into a problem with an animation with well over 2000 frames and couldn't export directly from the export window.

Instead, save first, open the file and go to the batch export option and drag and drop the AS file into it. Export from there. Hopefully this will work.

jahnocli wrote:Have you tried taking out the sound file for export, then re-introducing it in Flash? If it's all synced up, shouldn't be too much hassle. Occasionally I have to do this...

I'm glad to hear that you think I should be able to keep sync. I was wondering what would happen with that, because when I exported only frames 1-50, then another export of frames 101-150, etc .... I found that only the first SWF played audio in the player. No audio seems to have come in to Flash when I imported the SWFs, so I assumed I'd put the audio track on its own track in Flash, on the first frame, and just hope that would not lose sync!

cribble wrote:Also another idea to try is using the 'batch render' option...

Thanks, I will try that! ... OK, tried it. Batch export did work. It exported a SWF that contained all the animation and the sound, and played in sync in the Flash player that comes up when Flash 8 is open.

The SWF still doesn't bring audio in to Flash when I import the SWF.

Sadly, I tried just adding the audio to the first frame of a new layer in Flash, so it should start when the SWF does .... and it's crazily out of sync from the beginning.

I'll scour the forum for audio sync tips now .... I should add that this is my first experience with trying to use audio in Flash except as sounds triggered by button objects or one-shot triggers, so it's my first attempt to sync audio to anything in Flash, really.

UPDATE: Of course I have to set the Flash project to the same fps! [smacks forehead]!

When I remember to do the Flash things I should do, the audio syncs up fine for this 777 frame animation. Audio exports from Flash to 56kbps mono MP3, and the SWF that results is 16kB. That's at 24fps. I will experiment soon with the effects of changing frame rates. I went with 24 because I'm relying on Papagayo and its interface gave me fits on a 12fps test. I was actually hoping to output something lower than 24fps, eventually.

Nice! Thanks! I'm well on my way to animatin' some toon heads now.