Flash CS4 doesn’t like your FLA files!

Published by Ronny on November 17th, 2008 in Flash. 10 Comments Tagged with , , , , , ,

I’ve been an early adopter of Adobe’s new Creative Suite which has been announced in October. At first glance everything seemed okay, and I really really REALLY enjoyed working with the new Flash IDE. The thing I liked the most were the panels which aren’t animated anymore. The panels still disappear when you click outside the IDE, but they disappear instantly. No laggy fading away.

Another cool thing is the workspace switcher. I never switched workspaces before CS4 because of the overhead: You had to go to ‘Window’ then go back down to ‘Workspaces’, and then you got to choose you workspace… If you already specified any…
Flash CS4 comes with a few standard workspaces and a very handy button, located in the main screen of Flash. Changing workspaces is really only one click away!

Next thing that drew my attention was the 3D capabilities which are now built-in. I have always been intrested in 3D, but I never really got to play with it. So I hoped Flash would allow me some playing around with it.
I must say: The built-in feature is pretty cool. You can actually draw 2D objects and then move them around in a 3D space. The bad thing? The 2D object will stay a 2D object. You can’t change the ‘depth’ of an object. You can only alter the width and the height of the object. That’s a turndown for me. Nonetheless: it’s cool! :-D

But…I’ve been working with Flash CS4 for a while now, and I did have a very annoying problem.
I was working on a typography assignment for school, when Flash crashed. Happily I save all of my progress so nothing was really lost. However when I started Flash again, and opened my FLA in progress, Flash wouldn’t be very responsive anymore. Opening a MovieClip turned out to take almost 20 seconds (including spinning beachballs). Clicking on a frame and previewing the timeline seemed to be even more of a problem.

First thing to do, was to close Flash CS4 and open up Flash CS3, and check out that same FLA file. No problems. Everything went just fine. So I closed CS3, opened up CS4 again, thinking it would be a one-time issue with CS4. But I was wrong. CS4 was dead slow again…
I closed my FLA, and created a new one… And all of a sudden everything went fine again… Like what the f#ck? (And no: when I opened my FLA after that again, it sucked again. Same goes for other FLA files.)

What the heck is going on? I am working in Flash CS3 again for now, but I’ld love to work with CS4 again.

I mean: the panels still disappearing when you click outside of Flash is annoying, but it doesn’t hold you back from building cool stuff. And even though the 3D features in Flash are very basic: It doesn’t keep me from doing my work. But Flash not being able to work fluently with saved FLA files, is a serious issue!

Anyone having similar issues, or knows a way of fixing this? Or is this a very annoying bug, that Adobe needs to take care of, before we (or at least I) can go on working with Flash CS4?

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DARlas @ 9:39 - November 25th, 2008

I have same problem I was working my main project on CS3 and now switched to CS4… When i try to make textField in this project it takes about 5-10 sec to create(no problem i can w8) but when i type every char it takes 5 more… WTF…
On other projects NP…
I hate this…
Thinking about going back to CS3..

JFlo @ 1:25 - December 17th, 2008

I am experiencing an issue where I have some Flash movies created in CS3/AS2 with sound files that are loaded by actionscript using the attachSound method. But when I open the .fla in CS4/AS2 and export the movie, none of the attached sounds will play. Anyone experience this?

KDC @ 5:47 - January 17th, 2009

JFlo –

I’m having the same issue with my sounds not playing…just wondering if you have found a solution.

thanks…

Justin @ 13:16 - January 18th, 2009

Yep, this is a major issue in my opinion. For the first time ever, a version of Flash is unable to open older format .fla’s. So far its always Actionscript 2 files that won’t open in CS4, BUT many of them DO NOT have any Actionscript 2 written in the file.

I’m not a fan of the forced vertical stack of all my panels. Especially the Filters stack. You’d think that would have been a nice vertical stack, but since the Filters menu are STUCK inside the Properties window, I’m constantly scrolling down the Properties window to get to my Filters, THEN scrolling the Filters stack if I have (god forbid) more than 2 filters applied to something.

And has anyone else tried to save a swatch with an alpha transparency? You can. But then try to go and select that swatch. The Eyedropper just samples the swatch. You can’t actually pick it. As an illustrator, I like to make black swatches of 20% alpha, 30%, 40%, and so on, for drawing shadows. Its so nice to just be able to pick a swatch with the alpha already set. But you can’t do it in CS4. So its back to CS3 for illustrating.

Ronny @ 13:46 - January 18th, 2009

I’ve had my copy of Flash CS4 for months now and haven’t been able to really use it for my projects because of my problem mentioned in the post. When reading all of this, Flash seems to really have major issues…

Aaron @ 15:12 - January 19th, 2009

I had an interesting problem where Flash CS4 would not load or create any of my FLA files anymore. It just kept coming back with the same error: “The directory name is invalid.”

I checked, double checked, triple checked, manually altered, everything you can imagine’d the directories, and they are good. When I hit ‘Create new Flash File’, it will blink and go back to the startup screen. In short… it’s completely broken, and I have no idea how/why.

I’m about to reinstall it to see if that will fix it :P

Shaun @ 10:45 - February 12th, 2009

My problem with CS4 so far is that when I create FLA’s using Actionscript 1.0 & 2.0 it will not perform any of the instructions need to communicate across levels. I am using absolute paths and nothing seem to work.

Buttons on the main timeline do not work if the layer is not visible when you publish.

Also if there is text within a button structure that text stops the hit area from working even though the text is not even in the hit area. Putting the hit area layer above does not work I had to break the text apart to a fill before it worked.

Any suggestions would be great

Heath @ 4:17 - April 8th, 2009

CS4 is useless. I can’t open any of my old AS2 files, and if by chance I can, I select a text field and the whole thing crashes. Useless software, waste of money.

Megan McKnight @ 0:44 - November 19th, 2009

I opened my Flash index file in Flash CS4 today for the first time. It was originally saved in CS2 or 3 awhile back…it’s an old file. The image quality looks worse for some reason on the stage and at preview. I even updated it on the web and still looks bad. I spend an hour messing around with preferences and images, but how no clue why this is happening! Help please!!!

Rob Riggs @ 20:03 - December 16th, 2009

Adobe released a fix to CS3 files crashing/performing sluggishly in May 2009…

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html

I downloaded this update, and now my CS3 files open a-ok.

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