Imagine being able to see your mocap actors controlling their 3D rigs during filming in the view monitors on set. These were some of the reasons it took him almost a decade and a half to complete Avatar. He had to wait for this technology to finally mature.

“I think one of the great things about what adobe does with their suite of products is that they give you everything you need to complete your whole process, from concept to finish”

- Jon Landau, Producer, “Avatar”

Big Jump also uses many of the same programs from the Production Premium suite and in much the same way as was used for Avatar.  The streamlined process is becoming revolutionary in the industry, be it animation or live-action. I know I am excited to be working with an outfit that is as forward thinking as to be on the same page as one of my favourite Sci-Fi writer/directors.

“We never leave the Production Bundle at any time. The Adobe Production Bundle allows us to produce great quality animation in a very seamless environment and using Dynamic Link we can makes changes to any scene in seconds rather than have to wait hours for the footage to be re-generated through the pipeline. It’s a very exciting time!”

– Rod Amador, Vice President, Big Jump Productions.

Action Script 2.0 vs 3.0

While working with the new version of Flash (ver 10 or CS4) we encountered a few problems making the software unstable. We were experiencing constant crashes from doing things like cycling from one frame to another, or scrubbing through the frames.

We also noticed that the files seemed to be very sluggish when doing simple navigation through the stage. After many attempts at trying to clean up the files; which were clean to begin with, we decided to convert them down to Flash 8. As soon as that was done, the files worked great. There were no crashes and the scrubbing was very smooth.

So we proceeded to call Adobe on this issue, and after talking to one of their techs he suggested to change the action script version from 3.0 to 2.0. This immedialtely improved the performance.

They still don’t know why the new action script 3.0 in Flash CS4 is causing this to happen but I’m sure they will release an update that will fix this.