I’ve just wasted several hours of my life trying to add a Flash animation to a 2-minute sound file of Topical Pish.
My idea was to show the narrator speaking in a studio, with a monitor screen showing stills that relate to the dialogue/news and a news ticker scrolling underneath providing some humorous extra content.
Everything was fine visually until I came to add the news ticker. This is something that Flash can’t do easily, and so I had to get a plug-in. This worked well, and I was back on track.
Then it was time to add the sound file. This gets added to a separate layer, which was fine. I then started to match the timing of the visuals on the ’screen’ to the dialogue. Again, this was fine… until I exported the movie as a test-file. Two issues:
The first is that the audio goes ever-so-slightly out of sync with the visuals. So what worked in the editing environment, failed in the movie – and spectacularly so, as a few of the pics need to appear in sync with the sound for comic effect.
Also, it seems that the news ticker can’t cope with the addition of a sound file – I wanted the news to scroll across the screen at a rate that would allow everything to be shown before the end of the two minutes. Unfortunately, the addition of sound slows it down to a crawl no matter how hight the value you enter for ’scroll speed’.
I then looked for a workaround. Maybe, I thought – foolishly – I could export the Flash file without sound as an AVI clip, then add the sound in Windows movie maker? That would get the ticker working at the right speed, and I could play around with the movie to get it in sync with the audio. Nope – the export-to-AVi function doesn’t like something about the movie (probably the news ticker add-in) and just creates a corrupt file that can’t be imported to Movie Maker.
There are no other file formats I can export to that work with Movie Maker, so that’s that idea scuppered.
So, I’m sitting here having done all the work without anything to show for it because of bloody software glitches.
Does anyone have any ideas!? Please?!!
