Originally posted by woa
I have built several flash animations and they are great, but one: http://www.worldwidewebster.tv looks great sometimes and then all of a sudden the audio and the animation are not syncing?! I know that if there is too much info going on at the same time that could effect it. I have seen other animations that seem to be as complicated but seem so smooooooth. Am I missing something in the development stages?

Second animation: http://www.woastudio.com/flashindex.html looks crunchy because there are too many things going on right? What frame rate do you think is the best for the web?

I love http://www.2advanced.com stuff. They always look so fluid. I need to achieve this fluidity. Do you have a couple tips that I may need to take the last step into the holy sh*#! that was a killer animation category?

Thank you so much!
Adam R. Taylor
http://www.woastudio.com
I checked out World Wide Webster, there is indeed a lot going on which could cause the show to lag on slower machines. I'm guessing you've got your sound as one big wav file and you're setting it to "Stream", right? That should in theory keep the sound and animation in sync, but I think there's a bug in Flash 4 and 5 that makes the sound slip behind a bit. One way to fix it is to put "stop" and then "play" in a keyframe half way through the cartoon. This lets the player catch up with itself.

What I do, however, is break all the sounds up into individual phrases and sound effects. I usually make the dialogue "Stream" and the sound effects "Event". I still need to put the "stop" and "play" command in every now and then though, but at least the sound is always in sync.

(Also, I think you should try to limit the amount of bitmaps you use. You could probably cut half the filesize if you used vectors instead.)

I couldn't view http://www.woastudio.com/flashindex.html - kept timing out on me. But generally I use 20fps, although ProtoCops was at 24fps.

One tip I have for fluid animation is to have only one thing happen at a time, but quickly followed up by something else. This is instead of having ten things animating at once. That way you can have great animation and you also get a rhythm to your work. At least, that's the idea.... Also keep an eye on how much the screen is having to redraw. If you've got a big illustration with hundreds of vector points filling the screen, it's obviously going to run slower than a smaller optimized illustration with less points.

Hope that helps.