February 21, 2008

• Flash 8 Filters

  Rather than spend valuable creative time noting our list of grievances with Flash, we decided to focus on the feature that gave us the most pain – filters!

   

  Okay, the filters look great and they will immediately take your Flash backgrounds to another level.  But these filters come with a price; while they look good in Flash and when exported as stills, they are a bugger when it comes to rendering them as animation files from Flash.  So much so, that trying to successfully render and composite scenes that utilize Flash 8 filters has set our production back months as we try different workarounds. 

   

  So having said that, yes – use ‘em, but be aware of the restrictions.

   

  1. They will either disappear or ‘cut off’ (severely chop into the movie clip you have assigned them to) when enlarged to a certain point.  Solution; cut a large image up and make it 2 movie clips, rather than one big one.

   

  2. If you are using filters on several different elements within a scene, some of them will disappear when exported to .swf.  This is a random, indiscriminate thing, regardless of size.

   

  3. If you export you movie as a PNG sequence, the filters will still disappear if there is any up scaling (Zoom in) within the movie. 

   

  

  click image to enlarge

   

  4. Not specifically a filter problem, but a rendering one nonetheless: Sometimes an .fla won’t graphically handle an image very well, expecially if there is a lot of detail or a motion BG.  Be warned that whatever you see in your .fla will be what is exported in your PNG sequence

   

  5. This is the big one.  If your layer containing the elements that have filters is set to OUTLINE, the filters will not render!

   

  6. Panning with filter effects.  The best way is to make your image an animated graphic symbol, then within that animated symbol make your image a movie clip and add your filter.  Then motion-tween the animated graphic symbol

  We haven’t used the new Adobe Flash CS suite, so we don’t know if this is a relevent issue with that software.  However, there are a lot of people who paid a lot of money for Flash 8 licenses that are stuck with this problem, so maybe some of this can be of help.

  • 5:56 pm
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