Video Locking Up

[civ]

My video runs fine until the ending credits. There is a character playing a guitar and a character playing the drums to the rythm of the song. The guitarist is also singing the lyrics. It sort of runs ok when I run it in flash on the timeline. But as it progresses it starts slowing down (the animation that is). The music runs fine but the frame rate becomes choppy. This is only worse if tested outside flash. I've tried merging layers but it didnt really help. I also cut the credits from scrolling to stationary but that only helped a little bit. Are there any tricks to helping flash run better, or did I not check/click something. Help is greatly appreciated. I apologise if this is an unadvanced question that could have been found via searching, but I don't have the time to look right now and this is my first movie. All replies are appreciated, thanks.

[civ]

Please someone help....

[Buckwheat469]

The problem isn't with Flash, it's with computers and movies. As the movie runs you computer is trying to calculate everything that is being displayed. What happens is your computer sometimes can't finish a calculation and it has to scrap that frame and work on the next one. This keeps on going because the computer begins to run behind in calculations, so it might go from a perfect 60fps to 59, to 57, to 53, to 46, to 30, to 20...

You can reduce your imported picture sizes in Photoshop or another outside photo program and then reimport them. Flash has been known to be lax in resizing and exporting jpg images with the proper file size. This will make your computer run slow becuase instead of opening a picture that's 5Kb you might have something that's 800Kb being opened. Of course this slows the computer down.

[civ]

I scrapped it some more so that it is multiple still credits shots, and just a background layer, one image, a moving hand, and a fade at the end. It runs perfect in flash itself now, though it gets delayed in the middle of the movie when testing. If this were to go online would the same thing happen?

update - and when you referred to imported pictures, do you mean pictures that i have literally imported to my library and used? Because I have none of those...

thanks for your help hope u reply again.

[civ]

and if u think it would help at all i can post the file tag...

[Buckwheat469]

Depending on your actions you will want to not use tweens. Tweens are the hardest thing for Flash to do, so if you have some repetitive or easy action then you might try actionscript instead.

[civ]

I have many tweens throughout my movie but not in this scene. The rest of my movie runs fine however. Is it possible that those other tweens could be effecting this scene? Thanks for continuing to help.

[civ]

here is a question that could solve my delimma - if i were to continue editing to where the mouth matched the sound when it was tested,even if it didnt when it was in flash since there was no fram rate - well, is that a good idea? i mean, what if someone elses com works better then mine, would it run the movie fast enough to make it look good with no framrate, thus running well and not seeing what i see now? i mean should i just keep it so that it looks well in the program and then try to fix it so it looks well in testing too, or should i try to fix it so it doesnt look well in the program so long as it looks fine when tested?

[Buckwheat469]

Check out this movie, it's pretty funny but I didn't see who made it. Look at the quality of the animation. Everything is vector, which is easier for a computer to render, and the mouth movement (if any) is rudimentary. This way if a slow computer comes up then the mouth doesn't exactly need to match the sound.

http://www.mbychosting.com/illwillpress/ffm6.swf

To answer your question, a faster computer will render at a more precise speed than a slower computer. I have tested movies on my computer at home, which is extremely fast and they ran exactly as I wanted, then I went to work on a slower computer and they slowed down and got jumpy. Although I could see the jumpiness I am confident that other unknowledgeable people would not. You just have to give and take a little.

[civ]

As always I thank you for continuing to help me. How complicated is it to make it run at the auto speed I see many flashes as. Youwill start the movie and there's low quality, medium, high and auto normally. Making it run at this auto speed would most likely solve my problem. Could tell me how to do this? Thanks in advance whther your answer is yes or no, and thank you for continuing to help.

[civ]

Hrm that was a pretty good film and indeed it was a good idea the way that they were able to just forget about a mouth like that. Also I know what you are saying with the whole other people won't notice it. But I mean after awhile it builds up, and it gets off. I mean really, really gets off. If you would like I will seperate this scene for you and you can look at it when you have the time. Don't feel that this is something you have to do because I'm sure you are busy with your own projects and whatnot. Once again the whole "auto-play" question that I just mentioned in my previous post. Thanks for the help as always. If I can figure out how to do the auto-play feature this whole problem may be solved.

[Buckwheat469]

If you can separate the scene and upload the swf then I might be able to see what's going on, but I feel it's a bit like an avi. When you rip a DVD (not that you should), sometimes the sound will separate from the frames in the movie. This is becuase the sound is considered a separate entity to the movie. In essence you have a movie file and a mp3 file that are merged together into an avi. When the computer renders it the computer will play the mp3 separately from the video resulting in a slightly slower video and faster audio. The alleviate this, the people who made the AVI file format decided to make an option to interleave the sound into the video. This makes sure that the sound that is supposed to be played for a frame is only played for the frame and doesn't travel to another frame.

The point here... Depending on how you import the sound, you might have attachSound() or something like that. You may want to try placing the sound directly on a layer and see if that helps it. It will still stream the movie but the movie will be inherently bigger in filesize.

As for the "auto-play". I think this is an MX2004 function. You can try it but I don't know how it works or what kind of effect it has. It might just look at the settings on the user's computer, which are mostly set for high quality and change the quality of the movie for that instead of overriding it.

[civ]

here is the video - i hope i do this right...

[civ]

Hold lemme try again, I attached the swf file i thouught...

[civ]

SIGH I don't what I'm doing wrong, I just browsed and attached the SWF file.

[civ]

whenever you get the chance tell me if there's a noob mistake many people make when posting a file for the first time. Yes it is the movie and not the project. Thanks for your neverending help.

[Buckwheat469]

Try posting the file to a web location and just include the link to the file. I'll be able to download it from that.

[civ]

Good Idea, I will be able to get it to you by late tonight or tomorrow, depending on when my friend updates our site.

[civ]

there have been some miscommunications but the video link will get up eventually. The pictures a little bit too small, and my friend posted the video instead of a downloading link. if you want to take a look at it anyway, the URL is www.joypadcomics.com/hiddenzors.htm

but the video is very small and itll be hard to see right now.

[civ]

sorry been really busy wondering if ud wanna take a look at the video...