I am having huge problems with Flash cs6

[tristanp61183413]

OK so about a month ago I started  working  on this animation, everything  is going  fine till I start to receive a unable to save message, now the second  that message  popped  up I copied all of my frames at the time and placed them  in a new document  and tried saving right  away but the message appeared  again. This didn't bug me too much at the time because  even though  it said it was unable  to save, it still saved my work,but whenever my document  would autosaves/auto recovery, it would take 5mintues to try and save, during  that 5mintues I can't  doing anything  with Flash,  and then the unable  to save message  would  appear, the worst part it would  autosave/recovery every 10mintues, I tried to increase  the auto save time and even turn it off but it would  still save every  10 minutes. Another issue  I am having  with Flash is the out of memory  issue, the animation  I am working  on has around 12000 frames of audio, I am currently  at 4000 frames and I am starting  to get issue saying I am out of memory, Whenever  I open the file back up it takes way longer  than  usual  to open it, but whenever  I try to open up a file with the main one I am working  with, flash  sometimes  gives me a message  saying error  opening up this file,  This only happens  when I open it with the one I am working  with,  whenever  I open the other file alone, it works fine, but it got worse the more I work on my file, the next day when I comeback to work on it, I can't  open it properly,  the work space looks all corrupted, some times it gives me a message that this file could  be damaged,and sometimes it doesn't  open at all. I recently  was researching  about this issue and apparently  I had to go find the jvm.ini and change the default  number 128xmx.I gave it a ridiculously number like 14000xmx. But strangely it works I can open the file I am working  on and it looks  okay, and  I can open another  file next to it with out problems  sometimes. I fill like I am slowly getting there  on fixing that issue  but I don't  think the XMx should be 14000, I have tried lower the number but they don't  work.The last issue is because  I have  set the XMx to 14000 I keep getting a message  saying "error initializing  Java run time environment" everytime  I start flash, I can't export  publish preview  because  of the memory  problem. I don't  know what to do this is frustrating. All I want to do is draw but with all these issues  I see no point  to keep going to work on my animation, does anyone have advice?or should  I just quit

[Colin Holgate]

A good number to try for jvm.ini is 1024. That's already 8 times the default for CS6, so should help quite a bit. Setting it to something too high could cause the system to run out of memory.

One thing to think about doing is to take say the first 6000 frames and copy those into a new FLA. If that succeeds you copy the remaining frames into a second new FLA. Then close the original FLA it without saving. So, you would have:

whateveryoucalledit.fla

part1.fla //the first 6000 frames of whateveryoucalledit.fla

part2.fla //the remaining thousands of frames of whateveryoucalledit.fla

You can always go back to the troublesome huge FLA to get anything that didn't copy across ok, but you would then start to work on the two new FLAs.

A lot of things have been improved since CS6, especially with auto recovery. But some of the CS6 features were dropped in later versions, or work in a different way. But it's worth thinking about getting a more recent version to work with.

Once you have finished the animation you could copy the part2.fla frames and paste them at the end of a duplicate of part1.fla, and hopefully be able to save out a fresh complete FLA.

[tristanp61183413]

When I switched  it to 1024xmx I still get the Java Runtime error, and I can't  copy  and paste  multiple  frames now into a new file or even the one I am working  on, flash cs6 won't  allow me anymore, I wanted the recent version  of flash but the only one I get offered  in my app preferences in creative cloud  is flash cs6, I am guessing  my computer  can't  handle it or something but I don't  know how to get newer versions. Thanks for your help  though Colin.

[Colin Holgate]

If you have somewhere to post the FLA online, where I can get it, I could try the copying idea for you.

[tristanp61183413]

I have sent you a message  with a link. Thank you

[Colin Holgate]

I saw a message from you earlier, but it was empty. You can send a link straight to me at colinholgate at gmail dot com.

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

For anyone following along (though it looks like nobody is), Tristan has drawn his animation just as timeline vectors. Each time there is a key frame in each layer, that's like having a completely different drawing again. There are a lot of keyframes in the animation, and so although the file is only about 240 MB (72 MB of which is the sound), there are perhaps millions of vectors being loaded into memory. Hence needing 14GB of virtual memory to open it.

I've given him some advice, mainly that using symbols is a good thing.

[Asymetrical]

For what it's worth most professional animation houses use Flash or Animate to animate individual scenes and not an entire film in it. To make an entire film in Flash in one shot would indeed bog it down and cause the errors your seeing. I recently made a 5 minute animated piece but even that was bogging a bit here and there. I know this doesn't necessarily help after the fact but you should make each scene it's own file and then export them to video files and edit in your video editor of choice.