Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Splish splash I was making a flash-

I'm still in the middle of my animation project, but I have also begun working on a fully Flash website, which I will announce later when it is complete. I had only worked with Flash previously when creating my splash page for Nanogirl.com and it was just the "enter" button in the center and the "nanogirl.com" fall, never mind that it was years ago. I really like Flash, it's always fun for me to play around in a new environment (especially when I've been convoluted by different programs for extended periods of time)! But, there's just one thing, I don't ever want to deal with scripts for an email submit form button again! Yikes! Flash appears to be script heavy when it comes to anything more complicated than a hyperlink. I upgraded to MX, which has no problem opening early versions files, but the .swf's need to be exported as MX and not MX2004 if you want to send it to someone with an older version of Flash. For now, I'll have to go back to focusing on my project, and put this aside since this doesn't have a timeline!

Sunday, June 12, 2005

Vegas - the low zoom zone

Last night was interesting. I have been working on materials inside of Combustion to apply to a model on Max. I needed to make some modifications to my previously rendered material - so I went back into Combustion to edit. There were some extra seconds in my re-render, so I had the bright idea that I could pull the actual mat into Vegas (without re-rendering from Combustion) and remove the segments of extra frames, there for giving me back my original time line. I pulled the footage into Vegas and discovered that the zoom is a very limited feature. Since my mat had text layers that faded in and out, I needed to not effect those particular areas, but I couldn't see the text without the ability to zoom in close enough. Then I discovered the edit operation inside of Combustion and was able to slice and delete my timeline, and see it close enough to know where it needed to be done. A minor miracle, but now, onto the next challenge!