Swf doesnt work well with thirdparty softwares

Harmony Harmony Support and Troubleshooting
#1

I was wondering why Toon Boom harmony’s exported swf files don’t cope well with other vector based softwares?

For example I purchased “Sothink SWF quicker” to be able to import action script to the SWF animation made in harmony but bitmap images inside the SWF that I import to the software turn red and can crash the software. Without the bitmap image in swf file, the software works perfectly fine (still awaiting reply for this issue from Sothink)

Then I had a client offering me a project where he included a SWF file example. It is 103KB and very likely done in flash because he insists the work being done in flash. But when I imported his example SWF file into harmony, the whole parts of the animation went out of place. On top of that when I exported this odd version from harmony, the file size went up to 161KB

Preview: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5214903/out%20of%20place.jpg

This screenshot shows clearly how out of place the animation got imported into harmony which is supposed to be a ninja…

How come there are such problems with one file format as mentioned above?

#2

There are two different issues here, so I’m going to break this up:

  1. Importing SWF files

The SWF format is only quasi-open. There are parts of the format that are open, that we can interpret and process and import in. Then there’s other information that is not accessible, particularly from newer versions. To maximize compatibility, then you want to save it back to be compatible with older versions. There’s not a lot that we can do here, other than trying to see if there’s more of the format that we can support.

  1. Exporting SWF files

Exporting SWF files is easier in a sense. You should be able to export SWF files, and they should play the same as they do when you do the Preview SWF.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that SWF isn’t our format. Because of that, there are things that we do that aren’t supported in that format, such as deformers and some effects.

With the bitmap issue, that may be a problem of the player that’s trying to run it. Perhaps it’s running out of memory because of loading a large bitmap, I’m not sure.

-Lilly