This is a tip that I’m sure most people who’ve used Flash will appreciate.  Try drawing a few strokes on the stage – all a pixel thick. They may look fine and dandy in the Flash IDE but try exporting the swf and prepare to be shocked. There’s a fair chance that one, some or all of your lines look blurred and fuzzy. How annoying!

Well here’s a few things you can try to ensure that your strokes remain crisp and perfect, just the way you intended.

First, check the X and Y co-ordinates of your strokes and round them up or down to a round number.

If things don’t improve go into your stroke width setting and change the number from 1 to 0.9

If thing’s still don’t improve try reducing the width of your stroke incrementally from 0.9 to 0.8, 0.7 etc.

It worked for me:

I swear that this is a genuine screen grab of the offending lines – before and after.

Good luck!

Ever noticed that a line of text in a movie clip gets clipped by about 3 pixels at the end of the line? Rather an annoying bug, I tried everything, rounding the positioning up to exact pixels, adjusting the glow, checking tweens but nothing worked. I finally solved the problem by changing the font display quality to ‘animation’ instead of ‘readability’ worked fine!

Here’s a tricky little issue that I’m sure a few of you Flashers have come across on your travels.

Problem: You have an audio loop, like a clock ticking. You produce a perfect loop in your sound editor of choice and export it out as an MP3. You then import the sound onto your timeline in Flash and no matter what you do, you can’t get it to loop properly. It’s as if Flash has somehow added a fraction of a second of silence to the start and end of the sound clip, making it impossible to loop seamlessly.

Solution: Export a wave file instead of an MP3 – Not sure why, but MP3s behave differently to wave files in Flash. Wave files loop perfectly. Don’t worry about compression because there’s an MP3 compression option inside Flash anyway, so you still get the compression benefits that the MP3 format has to offer without the loop problems. Loop perfection!

Ever tried to animate the masking of multiple areas of an image and found that everything goes wrong?

Well here’s a simple tip.

Flash hates a mask that’s in pieces. Sometimes it’s fine but sometimes it messes up, for example if you have an animation of eyes blinking, using masks to hide / show the pupils, either use one mask that is connected out of the area of interest or two separate masks for each eye.

Note: Beware of strokes or the remains of partially deleted strokes in masks. Select the entire mask frame and switch of all strokes from the selected vectors to ensure that those pesky bits of corners or minuscule remnants don’t get in the way of your masking genius!