HOORAY

[egypturnash]

On a hunch, I managed to dig up my copy of the installer and updater for Flash 5. (The updater is important; Mac Flash 5 is crash city, while 5.0a is about as stable as Flash ever gets.)

Converted a sequence to 5 format, brought it in, and whipped out some lip-synch. With far less hassle and waiting that 6 was forcing on me. Exported it as a Quicktime to make sure, and damn if it wasn't about as well-synched as it was in the editor... a little mushy, but this was the first scene I'd done that involved this character, so I don't really know his mouths yet, and it's a kinda limited set.

5 is still slow, plus the hassle of still having to load stuff in 6 and save it out, and the ugliness of a Classic app under OSX... but it's not as aggressively slow as 6 has been on my machine. I do not know what the hell is wrong with Flash 6, if it's a problem with Panther or something particular to my machine... but I don't care, as long as I have something that works.

Now maybe I have a hope in hell of not falling any further behind, and maybe even pulling back up to where I should be. Wish me luck!

but first, several minutes for the happy dance.

Comments

[defenbaugh.livejournal.com]

Excellent!
Most excellent!

-watches said dance-

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've been using FlashMX on OSX and it's been surprisingly solid and well-behaved. I am only doing animation though and not any actual programming or interactive objects so maybe this is why. It will still abort on my ocassionally but on the whole it hasn't been too bad. I'll agree on the slowness though! Geez, even on my Dual 1Ghz G4 it bogs down. O_O

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Flash 6 under Panther doesn't crash any more than you expect Flash to... it just runs like shit. I should not get the spinning rainbow cursor for five seconds when I drag-duplicate a keyframe.

This is doing pure animation, not coding. Like making any web cartoon, except the final destination is video, not the web.

I blame Macromedia; they've consistently demonstrated that they don't know thing one about memory management on the Mac. I have enough physical RAM in my machine that I only get the spinning rainbow when it's doing very heavy lifting, like the web browser deciding to re-organize half its cache, or swapping in Painter after it's been sitting in the background for three days with a 300dpi image. Flash 6 spinny-rainbows all the time for me.

Dig out your copy of 5, re-install it (do not forget to hunt down the 5.0a patch on Macromedia's website!) and you'll be amazed at how badly 6 performs... 6 was so frustratingly sluggish for me that I think I got maybe ten seconds of work done for every ten minutes of slacking, over the past couple weeks, due to the intense pain of having to work at its pace instead of mine.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Hee. I guess maybe it doesn't seem so bad to me because the first computer animation I learned was AutoDesk Animator Studio on a 386-20 machine. Unbelievably slow.

You probably already have tried this but have you considered working more in Illustrator? Just copy your lines and paste in place on a new layer to get your key poses, then import them into Flash and Ungroup them? It messes up your gradients (although it does do some interesting things with blendshapes) but the lines themselves are okay. You might be able to spend a little less time in Flash working this way, and Illustrators tools are way better. I've made a lot of use of like Pucker and Bloat, boolean, and compound objects this way.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

*Happydancing!* SQUEEEEE!!!!

It could be worse. You could be dealing with bosses who were on crack and demanded everything be done in Animation Master.

[defenbaugh.livejournal.com]

Had a similiar problem pop up with Maya 5.0 though this week. Was working smooth and fine when I saved out Friday, then come back Sunsay and with nothing change dit was chugging like a train going from zero to 1mph.
-.-