This discussion got more and more interesting. Since any restriction to filmmaking like "use only one set and tell all your story there" would be plain ridiculous, the original question is more than legitimate.
My approach to AS/Moho was always to use it as just one tool in a whole production workflow with several programs, since this is the way I'm used to work for decades now. But I understand that many, specially amateur artists, just can't afford to buy a complete Flash license if all they want to do is just to complete their short film.
Right now there are only two solutions.
1. Use AS to prepare single scenes, export them either to:
- SWF, edit the movie and add sound in Flash
- or QT/AVI, edit the movie and add sound in a vido editor.
2. Prepare your single AS file cleverly by one of two ways:
- place your scenes/sets neatly beside each other in the workspace and do the "edit" by camera "moves", that is, let each scene start and end with a camera keyframe.
- place your scenes/sets separately into folders and switch their visibility as needed.
All the sound work has to be done in a separate sound program, preparing lines of different characters in a way which already was described elsewhere, work with them until the lipsync works, then apply the final mix soundfile.
Both of these workarounds will result in big files, and I suspect them to crash more often during rendering than smaller files.
A feature request would call for an intelligent solution to this problem. I could think of modifying the batch renderer in a way that it can render a list of files into a single SWF or QT/AVI, with some intelligent handling of either individual sound files or one master track to be added in this process. Or AS will adopt the scene approach of Flash, putting several files within one project. This would lead itself to a kind of library or asset management, because one would certainly want to reuse stuff which already was created in one scene in another.
Compositing Movie in AS - Please Help!!!
Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger
Excellent SlowTiger! You have just summed up all my issues in one easy to understand post.
I will definately be requesting some sort of scene approach similar to Flash.
If you can work on your whole project at once and use library assets across the whole project it would make your workflow so much easier and less cluttered than employing some sort of crazy workaround of importing loads of seperate AS files with duplicates of various characters that creates a large file size and causes the program to crash.
cheers,
D
I will definately be requesting some sort of scene approach similar to Flash.
If you can work on your whole project at once and use library assets across the whole project it would make your workflow so much easier and less cluttered than employing some sort of crazy workaround of importing loads of seperate AS files with duplicates of various characters that creates a large file size and causes the program to crash.
cheers,
D
This might be better off in the scripting forum... but I had a crazy idea...
It would probably require some... "real" programming... an external application of sorts..
Could some kind of tool be created separate from AS that would "read" AS files and determine from some kind of "tag" or identifier certain assets within a project and be able to update them outside of the project?
For example...
Artist opens a project and imports 3 external AS files tagged as "linked".
Artist opens the "project manager" to list the external files shared in other file/s.
Artist edits one of those files and uses the "project updater" to update all files using that file. Or the updater automatically updates based on changes.
------
Since AS files are plain old text... the updater could scan the files and just update SELECTED changes... like point motion, bone rotation or whatever.
No changes or updates to AS are required... of course... if down the road efrontier adds this functionality the project manager gizmo would become redundant.
Hmm... stll sounds like a cool idea.
-vern
It would probably require some... "real" programming... an external application of sorts..
Could some kind of tool be created separate from AS that would "read" AS files and determine from some kind of "tag" or identifier certain assets within a project and be able to update them outside of the project?
For example...
Artist opens a project and imports 3 external AS files tagged as "linked".
Artist opens the "project manager" to list the external files shared in other file/s.
Artist edits one of those files and uses the "project updater" to update all files using that file. Or the updater automatically updates based on changes.
------
Since AS files are plain old text... the updater could scan the files and just update SELECTED changes... like point motion, bone rotation or whatever.
No changes or updates to AS are required... of course... if down the road efrontier adds this functionality the project manager gizmo would become redundant.
Hmm... stll sounds like a cool idea.
-vern