Scene planning and media elements

Hello, can anyone help me out with a big problem I have with Toom boom studio V3.5.058 for windows… It will save everything but the scene planning… here’s what I did…

I created 5 Media elements with one cell each. I dragged the .swf files from the library and dropped them into each element I wanted them in. I went into the top/side view and positioned each .swf object one at a time and adjusted their front back position as well as their east west positions using the scene planning arrow tool (the whole scene is a field with a house in the distance - 1 part of the field is the foreground, 1 is the middleground, 1 is the background, 1 a house and 1 the sky). I kept checking the camera view to make sure I was lining them up correctly. I arranged them in the time line with the foreground on top followed by the middleground, the house, the background and then the sky.

Then I saved this new project and exited TBS.

I reopened TBS and chose my last project opened in recently opened (I have also tried opening my project by double clicking on the actual TBP file). It loaded the project. All the work that I had done was back in the original place it was when I first created the media elements. Nothing is spaced out the way I planned it in the top,side and camera view. It’s as if everything but the scene planning (offset possitions,etc) saves correctly.

It worked perfectly with V3. I have tried re-installing, tried starting all over again with a new project, I’ve tried re-importing the files into the libraray, I even re-exported the .swf files I am using to see if that had any effect. And so, I can’t think of anything else I can do to make it work.

Does anyone know if Im doing anything wrong? I cant make my animation now.

Thanks in advance
Steve

Hi Steve,

Everything you did was fine. There seem to be indeed a problem with the software saving the position of media element. This behavior happens only when you use the built in peg in the media element. If you attach you media to pegs instead of using the built in one you should not lose your positioning.

Also remember that swf can be imported inside drawing elements. Depending on the amount of layers in the swf that might be as simple as to put them in media element.

Sorry for the inconvenience, I mentioned this issue to RnD and we will see to is as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Ugo

Exellent, thankyou very much for the advice, hope this is solved soon, the reason I import them frm the library is because there are too many elements in my pics…

on that subject… is there a way to import an .swf so all it goes into 1 element? It just gets abit annoying when I import a drawing I did and it imports every little part of the drawing into a seperate element. If I make the original drawing into a png/jpeg etc and import it, I lose the quality and the background transparency.

Cheers

Hi Steve,

The Media element would be the way to go. The main reason that when you import a swf in the timeline everything get split is because some people might actually need to edit only some part of the animation and merging everything would have made the animation pretty hard to modify. In any case, I will inform you on any progress on that positioning issue.

Best regards,

Ugo