Running slowly...

Ok, I'm trying to animate a wilting field of wheat for an animation short I'm doing as a school project. I made three little wheat animations and I was hoping to just use them a bunch of times to create the field. I made the three wheat animations into symbols and just started dragging them onto the screen. The problem is, by the time I got enough to look like a field, the animation started running quite slowly.

My animation is supposed to have a very hand-drawn look, so I just drew the wheat and used the "trace bitmap" command, so each wheat animation has a lot of lines. I figured this might be the problem, so I used the "Optimize..." command (and I also tried smoothing and straightening it). This did seem to help a little, but not nearly enough to make the scene run smoothly. I've also tried getting rid of the symbols and just making a single layer, but this doesn't help enough either (probably because it doesn't really reduce the number of lines all that much). Right now all I can get is a smooth running wheat "patch".

I'd really like to avoid just redoing my wheat in simpler lines, because then it won't match-up with the rest of my animation, but right now that's all I can think of. I'm just about out of ideas given my limited knowledge of Flash, so I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions?

it is jumping or something??

No, the FPS is just running much slower than its set to run. Its the bulky frames I'd imagine. Perhaps there's some way I can render it out like one would do in a 3D program so it runs at full speed for the finished product?

Vectorizing the bitmaps will cause things to run slower since, as you noted, there is a large number of lines that need to be drawn. If you want to 'render', you'd have to export each frame as a bitmap and reimport it into flash.

As to which frames are causing a slowdown, look at the bandwidth profiler. Since you're using lines, the number of lines (and thus, the difficulty of showing it on the screen) will be proportional to the framesize in bytes.

:)

Well, the bandwidth profiler doesn't help all that much with frame-rate issues. That really boils-down to the overall performance of the PC/Mac that is viewing the movie. Otherwise, some very good points.

Mantis: You say you were going for a "hand-drawn look" --are you saying that you actually drew the wheat by hand, then scanned it, then imported it to Flash, then converted to vector?

Go to the symbol in your Library and edit it there. I bet if you zoom in enough, you will find bunches of "vector dust" caught in your symbol. These are very (sometimes very, very...) small vector shapes that may not be visible at 100% zoom, but can often occur when using bitmap-to-vector conversion with high-detail settings. (did you use "very tight" or "pixels"?)

The good news is, you're on the right track by duplicating the same symbol over and over again. The bad news is, every instance of the symbol creates more "dust" in the timeline and can cause slowdowns.

It's easy enough to fix, but you'll need to import the bitmap again. This time, work with the Trace Bitmap... settings until you find something that gives enough detail without anything that's too small to see.

Color Threshold: Higher number means fewer converted colors (& fewer shapes)
Minimum Area: Number of pixels sampled to determine nearest color (best is somewhere from 3 to 9)
Curve Fit: How closely the vector shapes will mimic the shapes implied by the bitmap. (the only true shapes in a bitmap are pixels, or squares) --find the right fit to make the bitmap look more accurate
Corner Threshold: The point at which a converted vector line will either "bend" (smooth point) or "break" (corner point) --smoother shapes take less power to play, "Normal" is usually the best balance

This should give you the best performance, as well as the most authentic appearance, when you're ready to publish.

Best of luck!
- Doug

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Well, the bandwidth profiler doesn't help all that much with frame-rate issues. That really boils-down to the overall performance of the PC/Mac that is viewing the movie. Otherwise, some very good points.

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The reason I suggested the profile is that in this case, more complexity = more lines = more bytes used...so indirectly, you can see how slow or fast a frame could be rendered. However, I agree that it's all relative to the speed of the machine, as you said. Also, it wouldn't be too useful for complex actionscript, since the 'difficulty' of processing wouldn't necessarily be proportional to the filesize.

:)