Is it possible to convert this Flash movie to Html5?

[tnbnicer]

Hi, I'm new to this forum and have yet to get a Creative Cloud license, which brings me to my question. I want to convert a Flash animation to a Canvas HTML5 page with Animate, but I'm skeptical that it will succeed in this case. The Flash specs are: Flash 8, AS1 + AS2, large vector graphic background image. It's a clock that runs backwards and has thirteen hours (65 minutes per hour) for every twelve, and is very very accurate. The clock face is half transparent, slowly floating back and forth and bouncing against the screen edges. To stop and start the floating action, you click on the clock. I wonder if converting is even possible.

Does anyone have a qualified view on whether the animation can be converted? Someone who has experience using Adobe Animate to convert Flash content. I would really appreciate it.

I realize it may be hard to form an opinion without seeing the example. Regrettably a moderator rejected the online link, so I have had to edit this post.

Creating the Flash movie took a month. Failure to convert it is not an option for me. Either it is possible, perhaps possible in the future, or not possible.

Sorry I can't link.

Thanks.

[Bani Verma]

Moving this query to Adobe Animate CC - Home​

[albertd9194959]

Hello....

Visual elements will remain the same within the conversion (all symbols are retained), action script will not, it is commented out and you will need to convert it into javascript. ( I haven't had any issue so far with visual elements not converting correctly )

Regards,

[tnbnicer]

I saw a demo of Animate that looked similar to Flash, with timelines and a symbol library. Are there custom JavaScripts which you can insert to move objects? I would need for instance to rotate the hour, minute and second hands of a clock.

Is JavaScript capable of multitasking? Ie. moving the clockhands and at the same time moving the clock in small increments across the panorama, while also color-cycling the sky?

I would wait a few years and let developers improve Animate. But in a few years there won't be anymore Flash. What you describe sounds to me like SVG and little else at the moment.

[Colin Holgate]

Adobe Animate is just a new name for Flash Professional, the interface is exactly the same.

To create something as HTML5 Canvas you would use all of the graphics from your AS2 FLA, but you would need to do the code in JavaScript. The style of JavaScript is similar to ActionScript 3, which is somewhat different to ActionScript 2.

From your description, I don't think it would be very hard to write the code, but being as it would be Canvas, that means everything you're seeing is a bitmap, and the performance of a large stage size might not be as good as the vector version playing with Flash Player. But, it would be worth trying.

[tnbnicer]

Thanks. It might indeed be worth trying.

A conversion to bitmaps I find worrying. The SWF file looks best on a high-definition display at full screen size. The practical reality is that a mediocre result would be unsatisfying, an even greater incentive to keep the original Flash.

Is there a good excuse to keep FLA and SWF files once browsers end their support? Apart from that Animate supports those formats. (I wonder to what end.)

JAVA applets have gone down a similar route, but applets are easy to convert into JAR archives with no loss of quality, and JARs can be distributed and viewed. Will there be a platform for SWF in the future? Distributing Flash with a player seems a little awkward.

[JoãoCésar]

You won't need to convert your assets to bitmaps and you'll wont lose visual quality. Don't worry.

And if you plan to run your content in web browsers, then HTML5 (Canvas) is the way to go.

Because it is still Flash, you already have the code, and the scripting languages have many similarities, I don't think it will be hard to port your code.

[Colin Holgate]

To qualify something JC said, if you pinch to zoom in on a SWF, vectors still look good. Do that on Canvas and it will look pixellated, unless you have code that resets the stage scale for it to then work at higher resolutions. I think that the current publish in Animate does some of that for you, and if you're not letting the user zoom in, then it will look as good as the same sized SWF.

SWF is used as a step in creating animations for video, it's also used in projectors, and in AIR for desktop and mobile applications. So, SWF will hopefully still be around after the Flash Player plugin is no longer supported.

One interesting thing, Apple have in their latest browser update removed plugin support already, but, even with Apple being famous for not wanting Flash to be around, the release notes say this:

"Legacy NPAPI Plug-ins

Removed support for running legacy NPAPI plug-ins other than Adobe Flash"

Hopefully we'll have enough time to convert things over to HTML5 while the browser makers continue to support Flash, even if they stop support for other plugin media.

[tnbnicer]

I appreciate your words of encouragement. I have had a look at examples of Canvas. I believe it might be up to it, albeit I don't like the non-scaling aspect. With embedded Flash, you could drag the browser window to change the scaling.

To prepare the SWF, I installed a trial version of Flash CS3. I learned that AS1 and AS3 don't mix. 100 compile errors on the first run. It's going to take some real debugging. 30 days till the trial expires. The clock is ticking. But I look forward to trying out CC.

I might have some more questions then.

Thanks. 'til later.

[tnbnicer]

Reopening this thread, if I may.

I did the AS1 to AS3 conversion. I'm ready to give Animate a go.

HTML Canvas renders bitmaps, while my original Flash animation contains only vector graphics. With the exception of the preloader that has frames, the Flash SWF is mostly math.

So my question is whether Animate exports to Canvas with better results than when it exports to SVG. I'm prepared to add/edit JavaScript coding either way, let us say.

Color cycling?

Alpha transparency?

Background layer image?