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THE MAC GOD · Feb 9, 2003, 04:44 PM

Ok, Looking at the terminator3 site makes me perturbed... all their flash animtion is smooth as silk... how do I create smooth as silk flash? I know 24 fps is what the eye sees as smooth, so howcome when I create a movie at 25 fps (better for timing things) it still has obvious chops during playback ... I mean it is smooth playback... not choppy because of computer (dual 1ghz metal front with cinema disp)... but because the tweening gave it choppy segments... any idea on how to smooth it out?

nugraphix · Feb 10, 2003, 10:19 AM

...it's all in the scripting.

A book called Flash to the Core by Joshua Davis might shed some light.

godzookie2k · Feb 10, 2003, 01:58 PM

he's right, doing your tweens via actionscript will give you a huge frame rate jump.

silverghost · Feb 10, 2003, 02:50 PM

yup scripting will help ya, but ive read quite a bit of books on flash and quite a few flash designers/developers set there movies to 30fps and up, if i recall in the book FLASH deCONSTRUCTION one designer sets his from 60 to 100. ill go into my library and see if i can find a couple of links to his work.

hope that helps, scripting and upping the fps.

aloha

THE MAC GOD · Feb 10, 2003, 10:56 PM

how does one script smooth animation?

DeathMan · Feb 11, 2003, 03:33 AM

learn more about actionscripting by reading the suggested books.

THE MAC GOD · Feb 11, 2003, 05:42 AM

Thanks... that helps a lot..........

These books are hundreds of pages long... what should I be looking for? EH?

chris.p · Feb 11, 2003, 01:24 PM

when you say smooth, what do you mean? easing in and out (speeding up and slowing down as it starts+ stops) that might help. also, set the frame rate to 31fps- its a bug in the player where flash likes this number, but chokes on lower rates. BTW, it looks like the animation was tweened on the t3 site.

ebolla · Feb 11, 2003, 05:35 PM

i have this problem too on my amature flash sites
its not choppy like a cheap claymation movie with low framerates
but it just seems very slow moving altogether as if it is still loading
it playes back at a speed similar to 6fps when it is a 12fps movie
i've of course veiwed in on multiple machines/browsers/operating systems to diagnose

i'm just talking about simple animations within the site with very minimal scripting

are these movie company sites just creating very short animations but when played slowly (like my site) the speed isnt noticed because of the dense frame rate?

take a look
www.designsforpeople.com

thanks
_eric_

chris.p · Feb 12, 2003, 06:24 AM

tips for getting smoother (frame based) animation

use a higher frame rate (31fps)
dont have too much going on at once
dont have large things moving around
dont use too many transparet effects
dont use too many gradients
ease in and out the tweens

However, all the above apply to ActionScript animation, aprt from the last one, where you could use a friction function to sort that out.

there used to be an issue where if you had the flash standalone player open, and Internet explorer, it would play the animations slow. plus some browsers are worse at playing flash content than others, and if you have 2 seperate swf files open, itll be taxing on the processor, and slow.

Griggsy · Feb 21, 2003, 05:47 PM

As far as animation goes it alls in the planning of your scenes, i was doing a couple of kids story animations a while abck, all the a/w had been generated in illustrator - 'hoorah vectors. i though, that will translate easily to flash.'

I'm a key frame animator by trade but use actionscript for stuff that can look after itself (cycling animation sthat sort of thing) after creating my loverly vector animations found it ran like my big fat bassett down stairs, not very fast and in its own time. I checked everything but couldn't figure it out at all.

Then did a later version but this time though of a different approach, after storyboarding out all the illustrator files, started to pay attention to the sectors of the screen that weren't doing anything, backgrounds, etc and tried exporting those out as clean png's an imprting those into flash, leaving the vector areas for only the sections that were animating (i call it the 1970' hanna barbera approach to flash design) worked a treat, its all in the planning (oh and unless your creating an animation for quicktime, nest all animations in their own symbols, that helps too)