I’m in a bit of a jam, and hope someone here can help me out.
I’ve spent the last couple of days working on a flash presentation. I set it up to be 1067x600 - just so it will scale well on my monitor. The project was supposed to be 800x600, and I made sure that all the important content is within those margins.
My thinking was that I could just resize the stage manually to 800x600, after setting it all up, save it and be done with it. I thought that the stage resized from all sides equally to reach the defined size. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case: all the cropped area is being taken from the right side of the stage, making everything off center, clipping off information, and is generally horrible looking. It’s a big assignment for a course I’m taking, and I need to submit it tomorrow at 6:30pm.
I’ve worked really hard putting this project together, but I’m sure I’ll lose a lot of marks if I submit it at the wrong dimensions.
I thought that the stage resized from all sides equally to reach the defined size.
You would think so, wouldn't you? I mean, that's what would happen in Photoshop, for example. However, as I found on many occasions, Flash appears to have been designed by the least helpful person who ever lived.
I haven't used it for a long time, but I never found a way to scale everything up in one go. You might have to scale it up manually... You can select multiple layers to move at once, so it may not be a disaster. But I've only ever done animations on it, so I'm not sure what your situation is.
Some tutorials, but i didn't find anything helpful :~
http://www.entheosweb.com/Flash/default.asp
I was thinking that the stage would resize like Photoshop, or Illustrator… Foolish me for not checking before I put everything together!!! I may have found a solution - using some weird ‘scaleMode’ variable in Actionscript to make it work.
I was thinking about just manually moving things, but there are thousands of frames and every single frame has animations on it - things moving in relation to the stage, not just movie clips that are moving in relation to themselves. And because the Actionscript makes the playback jump around from piece to piece, if things don’t line up exactly it’ll look horrible.
Grrr. This is really frustrating. I haven’t been ‘back to school’ in close to 15 years, and I’ve really been pushing myself to go beyond the course material. I got a perfect mark on my last major assignment, and was hoping to continue the trend.
Part of me just wants to just hand it in and be done with it. But, I’d hate to lose marks for something so simple. Stupid ego - must… stop… making… assumptions (regardless of how logical they seem)!
you can reposition everything in your time line at once using union skin.
here is a screen grap from Flash MX 8 (CS4+ sucks!) use the right most union skin tool(#1), drag time elapse over all the frames you want to reposition(#2) and then select all and reposition with the arrow keys.
Hey hey!! Thanks for the tip - that’s awesome advice!! I used the " Stage.scaleMode = “noBorder” " actionscript and it worked out beautifully, but that’s a REALLY good tip - thanks for taking the time to help!!
And now, I need to put together my final project, due in a couple of weeks: a full actionscripted website. Should be interesting…
I kind of like Flash. It needs a bit of patience to use, but the more I look at it the more I see the potential of using it to make some interesting and useful stuff, most of which wouldn;t need to be interent-based.
The website thing is just another project of part of the course, not the focus of it. I think it’s pretty neat to be able to do the things that you can do, but I’m more interested in the 2D animation possibilities. The first assignment we had to do was create a 30 second - 1 minute animation with sound, etc… It was a lot of work to put together (as we had to draw absolutely everything that went into it), but I thought it was really cool to actually create something like that. The second major assignment was to use the animation and use actionscript to create a presentation. That was a lot more ‘work’-like, but I ended up with something I could easily envision playing on a big LCD TV in a professional environment. That was interesting because it took what we learned previously and apply it to something practical (a problem I encountered when creating it was what this thread was started for).
This project, the website, is mostly about using actionscript to load files and learn to further refine the structure of the things we’re building. I’ll admit to not being really thrilled with the idea, but I have an interesting idea for navigation which I"m going to try to get working this weekend. Hopefully, it will turn out.
Learning how to use it properly is a big one - I was stunned at this class when the instructor was saying “Look - here’s a drop shadow effect! And look - I can apply filters onto filters! Cool!” I tried doing that just to see what would happen, and playback on my not-unpowerful PC started to degrade, fast. I think that sometimes, instructors throw out a bunch of ‘Isn’t this awesome?!’ at students just to get them interested, and then fail to ‘reel in’ all the overblown madness that results. Reminds me of the initial days of the interent when all those horrible animated gifs and coloured strings of lights were everywhere - and all you wanted to do after the damn thing loaded on your 28.8 modem was turn it off.
I’m still enjoying the class a lot, though - and every single job I’ve looked at has required how to use it… So, hopefully, my approach of ‘interesting but subtle’ with minimalist effects and clean design help me get to where I’m looking to go.
