Hi – Sometimes when I try to output an Animate 2 file to swf, the progress bar screen will come up, get to 100% then stop. At that point clicking “Cancel” or anywhere in the Animate screen will eventually bring up a Windows message that Animate is not responding and I have to quit out. This happens whether I am using the File > Export menu, or the “test swf” button at top of the screen. Some things I have tried based on reading the forums: keep the scene length below 1000 frames and disable effects like transparency, etc. One particular concern I have is that once the file has done this I seem to be locked out of swf output for that particular animation “forever” seeing as I have tried saving it as a different filename and completely removing any frames with effects and trying to render only a small sample of frames (like 12 or 24 frames), not the whole scene, in the new file. It seems like once the swf “freeze” has happened, I am unable to render any part of the scene as swf ever again. Any ideas? Thanks!
Thanks Lilly, I will do that!
On a related issue: We have just finished 5 years of Toonboon Animation Work and are (now) using Animate Pro 2. We have a sudden opportunity to place a huge poster in the SONY Centre in Toronto (starting March 1) to promote our work. But when we try to output a SWF image (1 frame) from our animation timeline of choice the software strips off all the effects (the beautiful backlit clouds we designed) and thus spoils the result. As far as we know, this is the only way to export a vector image from Animate Pro 2 that we can then expand to the huge dimenisons required (a theatre-sized poster). We can not output a bitmap file (in any format) with a 600 dpi quality at the size required. Has Toonboom developed any kind of plug-in to allow the export of a frame of animation in SWF without stripping off the effects?
Thank you Lilly. The export from Animator Pro 2 “in pieces” idea is a good one. I’ll try it. However, it would be wonderful if Toonboom would look at a new feature…export as an SVG (a scalable vector graphic)… in its next upgrade. Adobe Illustrator can import and read an SVG file! This would be a very helpful way to help animators promote their work in print.
When you try to output in very high resolution like 6000x6000 with blurs, activate the Preference>Render tab>Enable Disk Caching and restart the application (can’t remember if you have too so might as well do it to be sure it takes effect).
Don’t try to do an interactive render in the camera view at full resolution, it doesn’t seem to be as memory effective. Just do a real render of one frame. I just did that test and checked the memory and doing a render didn’t make it crash but when I tried to do it in the camera view it did. I’m on Windows so the memory allowed for an application is not as much as on Mac. If you have a mac you can go higher.
I put the Memory Image Limit to 200 instead of 500 mb but I’m not sure what it did exactly.
Hi everyone. Just wanted to update the topic with the eventual resolution in case anyone else ever has a similar issue. And to give ron from technical support a shout-out for his excellent help! After a few emails back and forth, ron had me ftp my files to him, and he was able to export it to swf. During this time I was also messing around with different settings on my end and found that if I disabled the sound layers, .swf output worked for me too. ron ended up suggesting using 1 sound layer which I did by recording the animation while it was playing in Toon Boom to Audacity, saving that as a .wav and reimporting it as one sound layer (I’d previously had 5 layers for the dialogue and various sounds in the clip). This doesn’t answer why ron was able to export my clip with the original sounds and I was not, but I am just reporting what ended up working for me – maybe some more technical users can chime in with some best practices for use of sounds in Toon Boom. Something else to try (although I have not done this since the sound fix seemed to solve my problem): ron also did mention trying to increase my virtual memory since “the automatic setting does not do such a good job on windows.” I will let those interested google how to do that instead of pasting ron’s instructions here, but I will mention that he recommended an Initial Size of 4096 and a Maximum Size of 8174. Oh, and one last thing ron mentioned is my artwork in the clip had a great deal of vectors but that may be a tradeoff one has to consider if you are going for a scratchy “deliberately sloppy” line style like I am. Scratchy style is one thing but if I am overloading my computer maybe a little line optimization will have to override my “precious artistic vision” ;D
A dedicated swap space (i.e., virtual memory) always gives better performance. The automatic setting is good for day to day web surfing and word processing, but for audio and graphics work, you want to tweak the most performance you can out of your machine.
Can SVG be imported into Toon Boom, like artwork made in Inkscape?
The problem is that the SWF format is a format that is designed by Flash, and they don’t have all the effects that we do, so we have no control over this. We do our best to interpret the effects that we can, but it doesn’t support all.
The same thing would be true if we did an export to PDF - it doesn’t support things like blurs.
There are a couple of things that I would try. First I’d try to export the image as one large image. Let’s find out just how big we’re talking about here - are we talking like 6000 pixels? Should be doable. It depends on how many effects you do, how much that bogs down your computer.
If not, try to take the image as a bitmap image in parts, then you can patch them together.
You might also try to export just the vector-looking elements to SWF, then to export the effects as a bitmap with transparency, and then overlay them.
~Lilly
I’m glad Ron was so helpful! He’s awesome, he knows so much and has been with us for a very long time.
I’ve already played around with the idea here of doing an export to SVG, and we’ve talked about it before. This might be something we can do. I’ll caution you though, with SVG as with any vector format, it may not support all the effects that we do in the software.
~Lilly
Not yet, no. For import, we support PDF, AI, and SWF.
~Lilly