When I export movies from Animate V7.6 I get a black movie - its the correct length, but a black screen. It had been rendering fine up until recently so its not the graphics card and I’ve used the programme a lot and tried all sorts of fixes- binning the preferences, restarting, recreating as a new scene, reimporting artwork, but still get the black render. ???
Is your animation all black with no background?
If so add a colour card to give the background a colour other than black.
Thanks for responding. The BG artwork is a simple jpeg and for some reason it shows up fine when in the OpenGL view, but when I select the Render view it goes black. There are only two other elements in the scene and these are jpegs as well, but they show up in both OpenGL and Render view. Seems to be really inconsistent!
Think I managed to get to the bottom of one of the problems. One of the jpegs was 16bit the others were 8bit, changing all to 8bit appeared to be the fix. However even at that when I import using anything but ‘fit’ as opposed to ‘pan’ or ‘project resolution’, the jpegs appear in the ‘OpenGL view’ but not in ‘render view’, they just appear black.
Another Animate Anomaly?
I’ve been thinking about upgrading to Animate Pro, but as I’ve spent most of today on this particular problem, I’m reconsidering.
Hi Lilly - All the files were jpegs, I tried psds and pngs but the problem appears to occur when I mixed 8bit and 16bit jpegs. Strangely the imported files were always visible in OpenGl mode but not preview, nor did they render when exported as movies.
Sent the file through as requested.
I have the same problem: I imported a layered (only 2 layers, mind) psd file, one for background, one for the character. Added some footsteps SFX and it plays through fine in the timeline. But when I hit render, it says “output folder is invalid”. It lets me export to SWF, but then just gives me a black screen. Same thing happens when I export to .mov. Is this a problem with the resolution of the imported .psd file? If I pull down the dpi on the original artwork, will it fix it? I’m just trying to keep the artwork crisp: even at a high res the elements look like they’re getting blurry.
PS speaking of blurry, how do you add a blur effect to objects? I create a blur layer but there’s no info on what to do once it’s in the timeline.
Hi Lily,
Thanks for getting back to me. I’m using Animate 2, and my imported PSD was 8 bit RGB. I’ve now reopened the Animate 2 file and although all the pegs, keyframes and sounds are in the timelines, the images are now not showing up at all (in either Camera or Drawing view)!
Is there a way of re-importing the images so I don’t have to reanimate everything again?
As for the render question, I tried everything - render and play, exporting as SWF, straight export…to a black screen (albeit with the sound). At least now Toon Boom Play opens up and plays it, which it didn’t before, but there’s still only black.
Dan
What file format are you using? Just jpgs? You can always write in to support@toonboom.com and they can test with your file to see where the problem lies.
~Lilly
Hmm. I tried importing both 8 and 16 bit jpgs. I even showed them on the same frame, and both rendered out fine. Was it just specific 16-bit images, or all 16-bit images? If you email in the problem images to support@toonboom.com then they can follow-up and find out more.
~Lilly
Are you using Animate 1 or Animate 2?
It sounds like a different problem than the one that Straandlooper had. He was using Animate 1, and in that version, we didn’t support 16-bit files. The support was added for Animate 2.
For PSD files, just check first to make sure that they are RGB and not CMYK.
What option are you using to export when it gives you the “output folder is invalid”? Are you just clicking the Render View? Or are you doing File > Export > Images?
~Lilly
Hi Dan,
Sorry for not getting back to you earlier, I went on the road - you should email support@toonboom.com if you’re having a more urgent problem like this. I hope you’ve emailed them already but if not, go ahead and do that now, so they can check what’s going on with your file.
~Lilly