Re: Does anyone use Flash to just animate anymore?

I came across your post since I am having similar problems. I use Flash for broadcast commercial and television and share the frustration of Flash catering to programmers and turning its back on the film/video industry that relies on it more and more every year. As I meet more people in the industry, I've learned that every studio has developed its own workarounds to Flash's weaknesses. Here is my workflow:

1. Bring my animatic with dialogue and sound cues into After effects.
2. Export reference quicktimes and aif files of each shot.
3. Work on each shot as its own fla file with those quicktimes and aif files as reference.
4. Export png sequences of shots and bring them back into After Effects over original animatic, updating same png sequences as I revise.

This process allows me to keep my project chopped into bite-sized chunks and the sound stays synced and I'm ready for final output. Now if you have to deliver a swf, it's a whole new can of worms.

5. Go into your shots and rename assets to avoid library conflicts. (usually a [###] prefix by shot to every asset. There are scripts to help automate this.)

6. Assemble shots into one fla, checking cuts to frame numbers in AE, like a negative cutter. Your project will get clunky an likely crash now and again. Save new versions often.

7. Bring final audio into Flash. Theoretically, this should work, but if you're doing something around 2 mins or longer, you'll notice that your audio file is a few frames shorter in Flash than it is in AE, and your lip sync looks like garbage. (????) Two solutions!

1. Chop that audio up with 5 or 10 frame handles and lay it into Flash. Now you can adjust you audio's in/out points and make crossfades and hopefully you can wrangle that sloppy beast back into sync.
or
2. Use your friend shift-F5 to trim your picture cuts to match your main audio.