boo boo and the stone of sisyphus, II

[egypturnash]

The Boo Boo cartoon is nearly done, thankfully. Tonight I will be laying in the music and putting the titles on; all that remains after that are a few lingering tweaks and adding sound effects.

In preparation for that task, I'm putting all the scenes together into one huge timeline. I grab all the frames of a scene, copy them, delete the scene, then paste them onto the end of the previous scene. Start with the last scene and do this repeatedly, and eventually you get the whole cartoon in one scene - which is needed for putting the music in so it goes over cuts.

Since the Mac version of Flash is terribly unstable once your source files get to be more than five or six megs, I've been using one of the few Windows machines here at Spümcø. This left me rather surprised when, after putting something like thirty scenes together, Flash put up a dialogue box reading,

"Flash is running low on memory. Please increase the amount of memory allocated to Flash in the Finder."

On a Windows machine.

I really wish I knew how to do a screen-grab on Windows.

I just love Macromedia's attention to detail in their testing. Really I do. Gah. If I never use Flash again after this cartoon is done I could not be happier.

Comments

To the right of F12...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...should be a key labelled like this:



Tap that, it captured the entire screen, tap it while holding down ALT, it captures only the front-most dialog box, in that case, the Macintosh-alike one. :-)

Re: To the right of F12...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hm. I tried hitting PrtScr when that marvellous dialogue was up, as well as one or two modifiers with it, and got nothing. Or maybe it did grab it, silently, and put it who knows where...

Re: To the right of F12...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Puts it into the windows clipboard. Open up image-editing-software-of-choice, or just MSPaint for now, and Paste it in. :-)

Sorry, didn't think to tell you that. *laughs*

Re: To the right of F12...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. I'm used to the Mac way, wher it saves the screengrab on the root of your boot drive (OS 8, 9, probably earlier), or on the desktop (X) as a file called 'Picture 1', 'Picture 2', or whatever.

Next time I need to do a screen capture on Windows maybe I'll remember that's the procedure.

[dour.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Macromedia's office building is right next to Electronic Arts', in Redwood City.

Of course, this probably means nothing. I'm guessing QA is that bad at just about EVERY software company, not just those two.

[minakawa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes QA of a software product is genuinely inept.

However, sometimes the QA is very good, but the product still ships with dozens of flaws. This is not because QA did not catch the problem. It is that the producer has decided that the problem is a waste of time to fix when compared with meeting the schedule and budget. Typically with a large software program there will be a database of thousands of small problems like this and the development team is forced to carefully select which bugs it absolutely must fix, and which problems it will consciously decide not to fix.

It is an oft-repeated refrain by users: why didn't QA catch that? For something obvious, chances are that QA did catch it. The real question should be: why did the company let the product go out like that?

Of course, the answer is that the company wants to make money, and a product in development makes no money.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

In my experience, Flash is simply not suited for what it ended up being marketed to do.

Even making a professional-quality web cartoon that's a mere two minutes long (Weekend Pussy Hunt episodes, for instance) became a nightmare of crashes and data loss once everything got put together; a large part of the sekrit lore of pro Flash animators is how to intelligently seperate the parts for as long as possible, only working on an all-the-cartoon file for a day or two.

Flash becomes horribly unstable when working with large source files. I don't know the exact threshold, but once you get into the double digit megabyte range, you have to save defensively, and occasionally save as a new file, close, and reload (this kinda cleans out accumulated weirdnesses and makes it less crashy).

And Macromedia clearly has no interest in fixing this instability. There has been a 'solution' to this listed on their website since I first ran up against this problem, back when 4 was the latest version. It boils down to this: "Flash crashes a lot when I start making whole cartoons!" "Use Director instead." Yes, thank you, no, Director is even more hideous and awkward as an animation environment than Flash.

One of these days, maybe Spümcø will upgrade to Flash 6 and see if it's any less buggy. We have learnt not to change Flash versions in the middle of a project after the hideous debacle of the super-crashy initial release of 5. On the other hand, maybe Spümcø will never do another Flash cartoon.


Oooh, I got ranty there. I've come to loathe FLash over the past few years, on many levels.

Sad thing is...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...it might well be a simple problem of the format they're storing it as internally.

I've always been amazed at the number of professional software packagaes... that have never been run through a bounds checker. I'm proud of all the code I've ever written for a simple reason, none of it can access invalid memory, even convoluted fat-tree binary search code I've done that has a habit of chewing memory up like a cold chews up tissue paper.

It's very likely, they simply have wierd memory leaks that they simply don't want to both tracking down, because they fall back to the basic assumptions (wrong ones, mind you) they made to store the format in-memory.

Though, with the 100% Macromedia-free Flash compilers and low-edit editors coming out now, some of those might end up being, while not useful for out-of-the-gate animation, the final editing, post-up, and re-timing aspects where the massive file gets compiled together.

Re: Sad thing is...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'd love to be able to try out some of the non-MM SWF-generation tools, particularly Adobe's offering, since Adobe generally tends to have their senses about them when it comes to interface design.

Unfortunately, it's something I'd have to do for the entire duration of a product, as there are actually two file formats involved in making a Flash movie: there's SWF, which is the final product that goes on the web... and there's the FLA, which is typically something like 2000% larger, and contains everything in an editable form. (Yes, two thousand percent. Depending on sound quality settings, the Boo Boo cartoon I'm working on goes from an 80 meg FLA to a 4 meg SWF.)

Macromedia publishes the specs of SWF. They do not publish anything about FLA.

And importing a SWF into an editing tool does not result in something usable - in Flash, for instance, you lose all the sound, everything is compacted onto a single layer, and any scripting you may have going on is lost.


Once this project is done, probably in the middle of next week, I will be picking up Premiere to start timing out Ren and Stimpy. I will not look back at Flash lest I be turned into a pillar of poop.

[dour.livejournal.com]

The reason I know the buildings are right next to one another, is that I worked at EA. As a game tester. A relatively good one, if I do say so myself. And there were dozens of serious bugs in the games I tested, which the teams I was on fought to get fixed, tooth and nail; and maybe two or three of those that ever actually did.

QA and testing are not the same thing. Testers find bugs. QA makes sure they get fixed. Usually, QA is entirely at the discretion of a single person, who is also the programming lead, and also the guy whose nose the producers are rubbing in the budget limit.

Which is about what you said. I'm just clearing up terminology; I never meant to imply that testing is incompetent, anywhere in fact. Just that quality assurance isn't a priority of the production team.