Fuck.

[egypturnash]

Flash 6 is extra sluggish on my machine.

Flash 6 has been lying to me about what it does under certain circumstances. Thus, I must spend a precious damn hour re-doing lip synch already done and eaten by Flash 6.

Because of the 'simpler, more intuitive' interface of Flash 6, lip synch is extra tedious nowadays. At least two extra clicks per mouth change. Or the alternative method of copy-dragging frames with the right symbol pre-selected, but dragging frames on the timeline invariably rainbow-beachballs for a second or two, for even slower flow.

I have been becoming a more calm, accepting, easygoing person lately. But using Flash still has this near-magical capability to make my frustration levels rise rapidly and scarily. Throwing things, screaming, and otherwise acting like a frustrated neotenous chimpanzee no longer has the attraction or tension release value it once did (see? calmer and more easygoing), but I must still vent or transform this tension into something besides back and jaw muscles tightening up...

...hidden use for OSX's 'Exposé' feature: Choose a desktop image that has personal significance and evokes tranquility, love, happiness, hope, calm, or a combination of those emotions. The more the better. When Flash becomes unbearable, press 'F11', or whatever you've reconfigured to be 'reveal desktop'. Let a moment of that full-screen image (obscured only by icons here and there that need cleaning up sometime soon) help take you to a better world where Flash couldn't be further from your mind. Happy siiiigh. Repeat as necessary.

I actually know people who say they love Flash. I just don't get it. I mean, I get BDSM in theory, even though it's mostly not my scene, but loving Flash can't be an expression of masochism... it's mental pain, not endorphin-rush physical pain, it's frustration, because things go wrong for no obvious rhyme or reason, leaving you a paranoid bundle of nerves wondering what will go wrong and how next... maybe these folks are just frustration junkies.

I want this damn Flash fad to fade soon. I need to find a better way to pay bills while hopefully remaining somewhere in the animation circuit with the occasional chance at jumping up a notch. I need a Flash developer voodoo doll for stress release.

Comments

[hydra-velsen.livejournal.com]

I used to experiment with flash, and I found it to be one of the hardest formats ever made to work in. i gave it up. Just too much frustration, even to make a stupid little slide show with text bubbles.

[rainwing.livejournal.com]

I woke up ready to swear at some point during the night you'd told me "Shit, I lost the job," but didn't talk to you so I must have dreamed it.. x.x Did you get enough done? *hugs*

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yes. Or if not quite, the beauty of how I did it seems to make up for it. Just a little nightmare you had about me, thankfully. *hug*

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I think the people who like Flash are the same ones who, in another life, created postal regulations and tax laws...

[mutleyjames.livejournal.com]

There you go. One step further away from Flash, I am.

Aside - you mentioned AI10 was buggy on Panther? Are you still having those problems - 'coz, y'now, my relationship with AI is still just blossoming and I'm an upgrade junkie. Say it ain't so!
What do you know about IllustratorCS?? Eh? Eh?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

"Buggy on Panther" means, so far, that it has crashed, I think, exactly one time since upgrading the OS. Maybe twice. Unfortunately with some work lost. Overall, AI is the most stable graphics tool I've ever used on modern machines. I really do not have the frequent saving habits that most Photoshop and Painter addicts do... and since switching to OSX in general, I've often left the machine on for days, with a drawing begun in AI, saved before I put the machine to sleep or something, but kept continuously upen over the course of half a week as I work on it in my spare time.

AI 11 (I won't say CS, just like I won't say MX) doesn't look to have any real new features. I think AI is finished, barring new directions for the program. It does just about everything you could ask of it once you wrap your mind around the whole 'layered shapes' approach. The few features they added sound pretty desperate; I haven't hunted down a copy to see how much the speed improvement they claim really is; it could use some, given how convoluted my art is becoming.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I still suspect that the people who love Flash are just not using it for anything more complicated than crude animutations of whatever the latest hot J-pop single is. Lip synch is easy for them because they cheat, by making a movie loop of the character's mouth flapping open and shut rhythmically, and as long as it matches the tempo of the music well enough, nobody notices. (In fact, I saw an animutation once where the mouth was flapping way too fast. It looked weird.)
(Make that weirdER.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

No, these are fellow top-of-the-heap pros. Something about the way my brain works, I guess, that just doesn't agree with Flash. Maybe.

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

I've never had a problem using Flash.. it seems quite straightforward to me and it's one of my favourite pieces of software to work in. Personally I hope the 'fad' never ends! Well.. except for the crappy Flash made cartoons that are all the rage on TV these days.. Flash is much more useful as a web tool.

I dunno.. possibly it's only sluggish and twitchy on the Mac? I know that previous incarnations of the plug-in for the Mac would drop to lower frame rates.. I'd build at 24fps on the PC but it would play back at 21fps on a Mac. Very annoying.. but they may have fixed that particular bug by now.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Flash cartoons on TV are exactly what I'm working on right now!

Building weird designey stuff in it is fun. But making semi-limited aniation in it is not, not for me at least. You end up with huge files, and Flash just doesn't deal well with huge files at all.

And yeah, it's always been a lot slower on the Mac than PCs, usually buggier too - Flash 5 had some severe bugs in the initial release, but only on the Mac, and it took ages for them to track them down and make a patch. Oh, and if you're synching to sound, always lay in the sound as 'stream', not 'event' or 'start' - otherwise it will play wrong on any machine besides your own. Using 'stream' ties specific frames to the soundtrack, and it will skip frames on slower-rendering machines to keep up - annoying because it loses the crackle and snap of precisely timed stuff on 1s, but it's better than the sound getting further and further ahead of the video. You can tell Flash geeks who came out of the Spümcø crew, or learned from them, because they'll habitually make a 1-second sample of absolute silence, import that and set it to loop a few thousand times, and have it stream through every scene. Helps the timing a lot. Also worked around some other ambiguous sound bugs with huge movies.

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

My biggest problems with the Mac framerate drop happened when I was working on a web tool that'd allow kids to create their own music mixes, using various music and sound effect clips. I had to do the audio control programatically and with very tight framerate control.. which of course went straight to heck when I played the file on a Mac. *sigh* I'm glad they finally got around to patching it.. though I'm guessing that they develop Flash with the PC market in mind and then try to port it to Mac. *urf* Makes me glad I'm a PC boi. ;)

I've used the 1sec of silence loop a few times myself, I found it especially useful when synching nested movie clips to the main timeline soundtrack. Sometimes it's just not feasable to turn a clip into a graphic for synching, if it's got script it has to run for example, so having that silent synch audio can be very handy. Plus, as you say, it allows you to turn your audio track on the main timeline into and Event rather than Streaming.. better audio quality. :)

Say.. do you guys have to drag and place every mouth/eye shape onto the head when you're animating? Or do you have the as child clips in the head clip? Just curious. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure MM is PC first, Mac afterthought these days. With limited testing that does not simulate the kind of load animators put on it.

When your target is video, everything has to be nested graphics, not movie clips, to work right... it only plays movie clips in the player, not when rendering to video.

Everyone has their own preferred methods of organization (and I need to apply mine to the libraries for this RSN, save a little hassle), but yeah, your typical head will have eyes, brows, other emotive parts (ears), and the mouth as sub-symbols, with the mouth further symbolized as one long symbol with the normal lips, the angry ones, the weird ones, etc, all one after the other; keep that in one place on the head and keyframe in new stills off it for synch. If the mouths were drawn to animate properly it looks pretty okay.

I wonder if half my hate of Flash is that I'm just not a limited animation fan. I don't mind simple designs, but I want things to flow when they need to. Flash doesn't. Flash wants things to either pop, or to hazily drift. I dunno. I think there's a lot of diffreences between the kind of animation Flash "wants" to do, and the kind I want to do. And the way it works versus the way I work.

an idea

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you could test render short segments to Quicktime in order to check for good sync?

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

When your target is video, everything has to be nested graphics
I've had the same problem with building Flash for importing into Director, everything has to be a 'flat' file.. and no scripted motion.

I'm not a huge fan of limited animation either.. it can work well, with very stylized designs for example, or in anime... though I suppose that's mostly because I'm used to it in anime. I agree with you that Flash's notion of inbetweening is pretty crappy.. I wish they had built it so we could 'write' a spacing chart and have it use that to determine it's slowin & out, rather than that lame -100% to 100%. It really could inverse kinematics as well. Adobe Livemotion had that, but that's about all it had. *urf*

Anyhoo.. thank you for the insights into how you're doing the Flash animations. I've been considering doing a furry Flash animation 'series' with Ferris for a while and may finally start work on it soon. If I can stay motivated. *chuckle*