The answer depends on what effect you're trying to get working. PM me with the relevant information and I'll see if I can help.

R1665

"How am I going to be able to place the chatboxes and forward/back buttons in a way which will enable someone to still use them when changing the viewing area of the screen with the VCam?"

You mean constant menu controls like Proxicide had in MK vs SF 3?

You can do that in post, but only after you have finalized your VCAM movements. Once you have your VCAM moving exactly the way you want, you create a new .fla. You copy the entire VCAM timeline from your old .fla and paste it into your new one.

You then go into your new .fla and open the VCAM. You remove all of the actionscript. You then place your buttons within this no-longer-functional VCAM instance. If you have added anything like color or guidelines to your VCAM, you remove them.

Now, with your old VCAM turned into a big square with buttons on it, you copy all of the frames from this new .fla and paste it into a new layer on your old .fla.

The VCAM frames and the new frames should be identical and move in perfect synch as they follow the same exact movements, but only one has actual VCAM coding.

R1665

"However...I'm very confused about something...How am I going to be able to place the chatboxes and forward/back buttons in a way which will enable someone to still use them when changing the viewing area of the screen with the VCam? Also...if I used a movie clip for the scene, I wouldn't be able to start the animation/scene halfway through, since movie clips play from the start regardless of how down the timeline you put the scene start point... This may end up being a "group, resize, place in _root timeline" issue..."

If you are simply moving a VCAM from one point to another, you can tween open chatboxes to move relative to the VCAM, giving them the appearance of not moving at all. Zooming is another story. While you can scale a chatbox up or down to match a VCAM's movements, there will still be visible distortions. It would be best not to show a chatbox during a zoom movement. Before and after is okay, though.

As a rule, you shouldn't have the VCAM moving around much when people are talking unless you're looking for a specific dramatic effect.

R1665

Okay, so let me get this straight.

You have one symbol instance that contains about twenty layers of movie clips. Most of those movie clips contain half a dozen movie clip layers of their own.

Am I getting this right? If so, whoa.

That would be so far removed from the way that I construct my videos that I could offer you no real constructive advice regarding how to proceed. The method of animating scenes within movie clips is well known and used by such authors as Proxicide and Suroy, but I don't use it. If I had to guess, I would say that the method that you are using is putting great stress on the flash program. Again, I could be wrong. I'm not familiar enough with the technique to provide a definite diagnosis.

The only immediate observation that I can offer you is one that I have heard, but not been able to verify. When I was learning flash, I was taught that the flash program might have problems with library items that start with a capital letter. I have never been able to verify this, but every item that I import and every symbol I make begins with a lowercase letter all the same. I'm not saying that's your problem, I'm just saying that it might be worth noting.

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You said,
"when changing how the character is standing, if I were to have made the character bigger in the previous key frame, I would not be able to match the same size in the new position very well if it were placed in the _root timeline, as I would have to eyeball it. (IE The character was standing, but scaled up to make him appear larger, and then goes into a walking animation or vice versa)."

This is a problem that you can clear up before you start by taking all of your bitmap instances from a character and placing them into one keyframe like a spritesheet. Once they are all in place, you can group them all together and then scale the group to whatever size you like. Then, you ungroup them and start converting them to symbols in their newly-resized state. It's probably a bit late for you to do that now, though.

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You also said,
"For zooming I've been manually increasing and decreasing the size of the symbol (containing all the animation of the character used for the entire scene) using key frames. When the character isn't supposed to be visible in a specific section of the scene, inside the symbol I simply enter a blank key frame and then add another key frame where the character is visible again (this is all done inside the "scene symbol")."

You can eliminate this entire zooming-resizing issue by using a V-CAM. If you have a VCAM in your scene, you can "zoom in" by simply scaling the V-CAM to make it smaller. It is easier on the flash program because you are manipulating one object to get this effect rather than resizing dozens of things. Again, that is something best worked out before you begin, and probably not at the advanced stage that you are in now.

I wish I could be more helpful.

R1665

At 5/4/09 08:02 PM, Sunrie wrote: Now, am I doing things wrong doing it the way I mentioned I was? If so, how is it possible to scale the characters and background, but be able to watch the animation play out in the timeline and make the movie able to be paused and start in specific locations in the middle of a scene?

Well, without looking at your .fla, there is no real way that I can tell what your problem is. The best thing that I can do is throw out guesses and hope that one of them works, which has so far not proven useful.

Now, by "scale", do you mean that you have bitmaps that you are resizing in order to match other characters of different size, or are you trying to create the effect of zooming in and out at different points?

This is important. Exactly what are you trying to do when you scale something?

R1665

Well, you can turn your bitmaps into symbols straight away without having to paste over and delete bitmaps. The only catch is that you will need to keep up with which sprites have already been turned to symbols. When you reach a bitmap that you had previously made into a symbol earlier in the timeline, you will indeed need to replace that bitmap with the first symbol you made. No sense in turning the same bitmap into several symbol instances.

You'll find that it actually lowers your file size when you animate on the root timeline. I'm not sure how it works within movie clips, but bare bitmaps used on the root timeline consume extra space when they are repeated because flash will have to load the same bitmap several times in several places, increasing your file size. By animating with symbols from the start, flash needs only to load each bitmap once for the symbol and refers back to the same bitmap each time the symbol is used, reducing file size impact. You may not notice a drastic file size change at first, but it will make a difference over time.

R1665

Okay, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around exactly what you're doing here.

I left a comment on your page regarding stream sounds, but there is probably something else that you can do to help it. If I had to guess, I'd say that at least some of your problem stems from animating long stretches within symbol instances. It is extremely unnecessary and is probably putting extra burden on your flash program.

Make a clone of your .fla somewhere else on your computer (so you don't have to worry about permanent damage). Open this cloned .fla and clear THE ENTIRE timeline while leaving your library structure unchanged. Once you have a completely empty timeline, open your original .fla in a separate flash tab. Now, you are going to copy and paste frames from your original .fla to the cloned one. Each time you reach one of these "symbol scenes" in your original .fla, open the symbol. Copy and paste the individual elements of the original symbol timeline into the cloned root timeline.

By the time you're done, your clone .fla should look like the original .fla, except your symbols will now animate in the root timeline rather than the symbol one.

It's a lot of work, but I recommend the cloned .fla method because trying to do a similar technique using only your original .fla would be about ten times harder to manage and damn near impossible to reverse if things go wrong.

If you've only animated the bitmaps within these symbols, though, then you might be in for a world of hurt. It's probably too late for this project, but for future reference, EVERY single individual bitmap that you import into your library needs to be converted into an individual symbol instance. Shove all of the original bitmaps into a separate directory in your library and animate on the root timeline using only your symbols. If you need to make a Movie Clip, make it with the symbol instances and not the bitmaps.

You should NEVER animate raw bitmaps unless they are going into VERY short Movie Clips and would never be used outside of the Movie Clip (such as one frame of a burning fireball).

R1665