CompuServe Thread

I hit the same problems you did and I have now completely given up on the product. I think Autodesk should probably do a recall of the product before they lose complete credibility and built-up goodwill. In the 90's Public Relations firms generally advise that companies should respect the client and not try to BS them. This product isn't even a mature alpha release and I don't believe the release we are supposed to get will fix such built-in design errors. LS

"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)." Al, Brent is the Acting Product Manager for AAStudio, and he saw your message and asked me to post his reply to you: Sorry, Al, as a reviewer, you must know from experience that in this modern world people just don't read information like they used to. In fact, you seem to have misread the tutorial step on page 154 step 6: In the film strip, click frame 1 and then drag to frame 7 to create a time segment that includes frames 1 through 7. The animation concept idea is that you start the diamond wipe on frames 1-7, then use Render/Continue and complete the out sequence on frames 8-12. Since you didn't setup the proper frames the software did what you asked and Render/Continue was logically greyed out. In addition, you should be checking your resources and see if you have anything near a standard Windows install on your computer. Reviewers typically put all sorts on non-standard items on their systems and often simply need to clean up their systems. I hope you don't mind me giving you a little help getting through the tutorial. -Brent Blackett acting Product Manager

Whoops, I meant to include Brent's responses all in one email back to you. He commented on various parts of your message. It's kinda long… You: "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!" Brent:The C0 version has some memory leaks that have been addressed in version 1c1. A bigger issue is getting into the habit of saving your file more often, because saving is what closes out your undo buffer, which can become quite large and is probably the cause of your whirring. On the other hand it is nice to be able to undo undo undo undo…etc. A tip if you are running low on resources is to go to the Settings/Preferences Menu and drop the Undo resources to half of their current values and see if you get better response. A typical problem is heavy network drivers, cd rom drivers, drive-space, etc. all in low memory. Animator Studio needs to be able to call MCI drivers and other .dlls from windows and as we all know Win3x has a shortage of low dos memory. You: 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. Brent: My impression in that you are experiencing slow performance in both Animator Studio and Corel. Check out a mini-tutorial below: I'd expect that you see Animator Studio, with its 24 bit color, with 8 bit selection sets, 8 bit mask and 8 bit alpha channel and infinite undo to be slower than Animator Pro. If you want speed and are happy with 8 bit color we have Animator Pro which is our DOS product for animation. Here are the steps to do this procedure using Animator Studio: First get your settings for this type of selection: Right click on the background color, and in the dialog, set the background color to the image background using the eye-dropper Double click on the lasso and adjust your selection to Equal (=), Key out Background, Set the Tolerance and Soft Edge to your taste Now do the rotation using these steps: Go to the frame Turn off time Draw a rough lasso around the leg (Background removed automatically, very cool) Move the cursor into the marching ants and "push" the selection so it floats (or SHIFT-F) Move the selected area using the cross bar cursor SHIFT-O to change the origin to match the leg SHIFT-R to rotate ENTER to render -> Key to advance the frame If this procedure takes you over two minutes I recommend you reinstall Windows. Your system is too mixed up. You: The problems with scriptor persist… Brent: We have added improved full screen playback in 1c1 to aid in recording in real time to video tape.

Dear Al/sysop: I couldn't agree with you more! I received the evaluation copy with total excitement. What I found was a program with a fantastic concept and tools anyone would dream of, unfortunately they were ONLY a dream. The program brought my P90 with 64 bit graphic card and 16 MB RAM to a screeching halt. I am a number one fan of Autodesk in all phases of their operation and I believe this product was released prematurely or something else went wrong. Unlike other companies, I believe when Autodesk says they'll make good on the software, they will. I am also waiting for the update to see what changes will take place. One problem I've run into is when I import a BMP or JPEG (24 bit) into AS and modify it by using one of the paint tools, when I go to save it as JPEG or BMP I get an error stating "this file format cannot save all the data in this movie. Consider saving as an AVI file. The following data will not be saved: selection channel" It will finally save it to JPEG, BMP or AVI but the resulting image is distorted. (graphic card #9 GXE) That hard drive noise drives me nuts too! I gotta get more RAM!!! Here's looking forward to a new release of AS comparable to 3DS4! JB