#Bad Buggums
Well, I've bravely continued my journey through the Animator Studio tutorials
(and judging by the horrors I've encountered, I'm beginning to think this is an
area where no Autodesk beta testers have gone before) and I'm finding little to
like and much to hate about Animator Studio. My magazine review is shaping up
to be a flame job the likes of which hasn't been seen since Waco. I'm hoping
the update will get into my hands before deadlines make it impossible to
evaluate the progress in fixing the problems. In the meantime, here's a few
more anomalies I've encountered, and any insifght would be appreciated….
pg.156 Tweening a Shape…. Am I the only one who has the called for "Choose
Action/Render and Use Last option unavailably grayed out? My only choices at
this point in the tutorial are Render. Any attempt to close out of this
exercise results in Flipper flipping out with a GPF in whatever flavor dll he
feels like chewing on at that moment. (it varies).
Is it me or does the program quickly come ..to…..a…..c..r..a…w….l….
like its bleeding away my memory? The disk thrashing becomes quite rythmic and
runs for such an extended period of time that I'm considering recording it and
putting out one of those techno-pop dance masters. Even Photoshop chewing
through a 10 meg file isn't this bad fellas!
I did some comparisons using the same bitmap character as a starter in both
CorelMOVE ans AS.
After importing the BMP I created a 10 frame avi and then went to the second
frame, lassoed the characters legs and rotaed them slightly and then saved the
results. Both programs were set to onionskin 1 frame and the times are as
follows
Animator Studio: 2:45 to do these actions
CorelMOVE: 1:45
The main difference being the waiting time between ever action in AS while you
hang around for the cursor to get free again. Pretty sad considering Move is an
afterthought module thrown onto CorelDraw and AS is a dedicated animation
program from one of the leaders in PC animation.
The problems with scriptor persist, but amazingly, if I use my own AVI files
instead of those provided with the tutorial, it doesn't crash as much. The
ability to play MIDI behind your AVIs is cool, but where is the easy way to
offset your added WAV. files so they don't play immediately when the new AVI
starts? Do I really have to record a wave file with blank space in front to
offset to get things synched up or is there a shortcut? Anyway to play back
your scriptor films at the same screen size, even if your source clips are
different? (be a nice feature for dumping to video tape in real time)
Overall, I'm thinking that someone said it was "soup" before they should have!
Al