moving things small increments using mouse (AdAn)

[jesse6C12]

in Adobe Animate...it seems im unable to easily move things in small ammounts...i can use the keyboard, but it seems this version of animate has a 'are you sure you want to move that?' feature...where the first few pixels of movement when dragging something are ignored, after that it works fine but this causes me to need to often move something further than i want, then move it back and try to keep it consistant in how an object is moving in the animation...rather annoying...

ive been told animate 2017 and older adobe flash versions dont have this issue, but i was hoping there is some kind of option to disable this feature...

it might also be a case of an object just not moving right away, some kind of lag...but ive also seen this to not be present on older adobe flash/animate versions...what happened?

to be clear this is NOT because of having the 2 snap settings commonly in the top right being on, magnet snapping and all that, see below

i didnt find any other settings that jumped out at me as relating to the issue either, when going through preferences and such...


another question: how do i set default onionskin settings? id prefer having it always use outline by default, but i cant find an option.

[jesse6C12]

ugh, i forgot to add tags...and i dont see an edit button

[n. tilcheff]

To quote:

"ive been told animate 2017 and older adobe flash versions dont have this issue, but i was hoping there is some kind of option to disable this feature...

it might also be a case of an object just not moving right away, some kind of lag...but ive also seen this to not be present on older adobe flash/animate versions...what happened?"

Here is what happened: Adobe introduced the so called Advanced Layers in Animate 2019 with the idea that it will allow them to extend functionality. This is realised by wrapping every layer inside a hidden movie clip and controlling all this with Action Script in the IDE.

The result was immediate huge drop of performance and noticeable lag + hundreds of new bugs.

Most new features such as keyframe-based filters, camera and layer parenting are realised via Advanced Layers.

Flash CS5-CS6 have none of these issues and run really well on Windows.

[jesse6C12]

that's good information, thank you.

however it seems the solution to stop the lag and such then is....to use an older version of animate...and miss out on the other features....except i dont think i even use any of them, i still use Vcams...

so...i guess the question now is...does adobe have available older versions of flash/animate?

[n. tilcheff]

Your conclusions are correct.

The new features are poorly implemented and not well-designed. 

"does adobe have available older versions of flash/animate?"

No. When they introduced the CC subscription model, they promised to always keep old Flash CS6 available, as well as all other older version, but a few years later just cut off access to anything but the last 3 versions without warning users.

You can read more in this thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/animate-discussions/not-allowed-to-use-flash-anymore/td-p/10478456

[jesse6C12]

so i did some testing and it happens on CS 6 as well...

so i dont think its lag in this case...it seems for a long time now (maybe always?) adobe has elected to be hesitant when trying to click/move something...

in animate, when using the Free Transform Tool, having an object selected has a small blue box around it as well as the black one for resizing...when moving an object this blue box goes away. using this, ive held M1 down on an object and see it takes roughly half to 3/4 of a second for that blue box to go away, faster if i try to move it right away...

this secondary method to actually start interacting with the object only seems to work if you move the mouse a certain distance from where you clicked...

now, even at 2000% zoom im needing really small adjustments and how all this works is really getting in the way of that. so assuming it isnt lag then....is there a way to change his behavior?

[n. tilcheff]

Make sure you have all kinds of snapping disabled in CS6. Go to the View menu > Snapping and uncheck everything. 

With rotation there are minimal increments that are not too small, so you might be hitting this.

There may be other factors, such as how the object is nested, where the Registration and Transformation points are, scaling and so on, which you should explore.

In CS6 also make sure you switch your Document to AS2.

Good luck!

[jesse6C12]

i've kind of just gone back to AA at this point, CS6 had a few other issues that i didnt care for, so i gave up on that bit...

only other thing is: is it possible to rotate in super small increments like you can move things with arrow keys?

[jesse6C12]

ive also found you can disable advanced layers in the modify>document tab...

it didnt change anything, unfortunately.

[n. tilcheff]

As I said you should go to CS and use AS2 as your Document setting.