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Known Participant
February 7, 2023
Open for Voting

Real-time playback

  • February 7, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 168 views
I don't think you guys noticed this, but I'm sure that thousands of your users have-

In-app playback in Animate and Character Animator absolutely sucks. How is it that in 2002, you could scrub and play through the timeline as you work and get frame-accurate playback. But now, with vastly faster CPUs, we can't see that anymore and we have to resort to exporting videos and swfs just to see what we are doing actually looks like? You should be ashamed of yourselves at how poorly your apps perform, given the horsepower of modern computers. It's deplorable. What's your excuse Adobe? I was never a member of the Apple/Jobs cult. But he nailed it when he called you out for being lazy. I've been using "Flash" for character animation for over twenty years. For the first several years of my career, I was able to play through my work in-app and see EXACTLY what the animation looked like. Now when I do it, I see the apps struggling to deliver a 10 fps rate. WTF?!? Computers evolve and yet Adobe devolves. I despise you. I can't understand why no other company has risen to challenge your incompetency. Oh My God do I wish there was an alternative to Adobe. I can't believe no one has utterly stomped you out by now. I expect no reply. I expect NOTHING from you. NOTHING is what we get from you. You're coasting, riding on your laurels, raking in billions and you don't give a **** about your users at all.

Oh yeah, I guess I forgot during my rant, but my gripe is that in-app playback sucks donkey balls and you have no excuse because I distinctly remember it working PERFECTLY 15 years ago. So get on it, or shut down this whole "How can we improve" ********. Step up or ********.

1 reply

Community Manager
February 7, 2023
You expect no reply and I'm writing one anyway because you are dead wrong about whether we care about our customers. You can ask the various customers whose requests we've answered or fulfilled, bugs we've diagnosed and fixed, or those we've supported in using Character Animator to create actual shows in production.

There's a few things to pick apart in here. First off, a point of a agreement. Wirth's Law is very real and I hate it, too: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/24381/wirths-law

I dislike it so much that I keep old machines to use for testing because I want to _feel_ performance issues that really high end hardware would hide by powering through.

Second point: Adobe Animate (formerly known as Flash) and Character Animator have relatively little in common. You could argue that they should be more related, but they are very different under the hood and Character Animator didn't exist 15 years ago and what it is doing is an apples and oranges comparison in terms of how fast it "should" be able to do it.

Should it be faster? Yeah, probably. I pretty regularly bury the needle at 60 fps rendering scenes on my machines (still plenty faster than the 24 or 30 that I'd typically want to use), but with a more complex puppets and scenes that can definitely get slower than we'd like. We do sometimes work on optimizing performance, but it gets balanced with other features and requests.

Third: It would be easy to return hate with hate and maybe that would be more satisfying for you somehow. But I don't despise you. I see somebody who is clearly frustrated and unhappy using a product I work on improving and that bums me out a little.

If you want to share a puppet or project, I'd be curious to see if I can help find ways to make it faster (or make Ch efficient at rendering it).

If not, though, I hope the rant was cathartic. I get it. Software can be infuriating. If I had a nickel for every time I swore at a piece of software, I could dive Scrooge McDuck style in that pile of nickels.

Dan Tull
Character Animator Team

P.S. Also agree that the bit where scrubbing doesn't precisely replicate the frames you'll get on playback can be _super_ annoying. There are reasons it behaves like that, though I can understand how frustrating it is.