Template problems

I am creating an animation that reuses the same character inside a single scene. My character is an ant an I have a 20 frame walk cycle. I used the cutout process from a scanned drawing. Each leg consists of an upper and lower part. Each arm is a single part and the head, thorax and tail are a single piece. This means that my ant consist of five pieces. At any rate as I build scenes my Toonboom studio slows down. I mean after two scenes this is evident. My output for just the first scene is 40K and three scenes is 240K for a SWF file.

I even tried to import my finished scenes into Flash MX. They work just fine except they are offset by half a screen.

I am having several problems and do not know if I am missing something. They are as follows;

1. How do I collapse my ant to the template library? All the stuff from Toonboom can be placed on the timeline as one layer. Mine comes back as all the layers and pegs, but not one piece.
2. How many scenes can be created for a single animation? I intended to have a dozen or so. If this is a problem then can the finished SWF be merged into a single movie?
3. What is the deal with

This is an old post, so I don’t figure the person who wrote it way back over a year ago is going to still be interested in the subject, but, for people who might be looking around for topics related to their issue of the day, archiving to the Library is just a matter of clicking on an element or group of cells and dragging them to the folder you want to put it in. Unfortunately TBS 4 is pretty wimpy about how much you can stuff in a Library folder. I found that out today. Touching on another subject brought up in this old post, I have to say that TBS 4 is just plain wimpy all round. It can’t handle a lot of frames. I intend to post my cartoons on the Web at 30 frames per second, which is a lot of frames, and TBS begins to slog before I’ve even worked out less than a minute of stuff. It’s best to just do segments of a production in different sessions, save them as SWFs, throw the SWF files together in Flash, then export them as SWFs from there back into Toon Boom for final export—or at least that’s where I’m at with it this week. Toon Boom exports lots better than my old Flash 4 as far as visual quality goes, even once I’ve crunched everything down to almost nothing in my MP4 converter. Today I put together something made almost exclusive in Flash with something made almost exclusively in Toon Boom.

As for poor souls who do not have a Flash, what can I say? I’d never have taken an interest in Toon Boom if I did not have Flash and Photoshop. The idea that it’s a truly stand-alone program depends on how a person defines that term.