Keeping Sound in Sync with Long Flash Animations

Whether you’re just starting out in Flash, or have been playing with it for some time, chances are you have run into problems with sound synchronization. If you’re new to Flash and have been experiencing problems in this area, chances are the solution is very simple as I will explain in a moment. However, if the following isn’t news to you and you’re still having problems, keep reading, the solution may follow.

Sound Properties: Event and Stream

There are two main options for your sounds in flash: event and stream. If your sound isn’t syncing up, it’s likely that all you have to do is make sure your sounds are set to stream and not event. If a sound is set to stream flash prioritizes the sound and if you’re animation can’t keep up then frames will be dropped in order to keep sync.

Simple enough, right? I thought so too. Unfortunately, as our animations for Vote4Oz grew longer we found our sound losing sync anyway. Needless to say it was pretty devastating. After searching through many forums for the answer to our dilemma, I finally discovered the solution to what (as far as I know) is a bug in flash. Read on.

If you’re producing a lengthy animation, chances are you’re using the scenes feature in Flash. After about the 3rd scene you may notice some massive problems with sound synchronization (whether or not your sound properties are set to stream). The solution is to fool Flash by placing a layer known as the “Sound Kicker” in every scene.

  1. Create a new layer and label it “SoundKicker”
  2. On the 5th frame of this layer create a keyframe
  3. Create, find, or download an audio file that contains about 1 second of silence
  4. Import the sound into your library
  5. With the 5th frame selected, attach the silent audio file and choose Stream and Loop from the Sync portion of the frames properties.
  6. On the 6th frame of the “SoundKicker” layer create another blank keyframe

(you’re layer should look like this now)

The little gizmo will throw Flash into a constant loop of a streaming sound that no one will be able to hear. Now, instead of setting the rest of your sounds to Stream, set the to Event. Flash will still treat this Event sounds as streaming sounds, only the sync problems on and after the 3rd scene should be corrected. Make sure you do this for every scene and that all your sounds are now set to event. This problem occurred in Flash 8, and most likely in previous versions as well.

February 3, 2008 | Filed Under Flash 

Comments

2 Responses to “Keeping Sound in Sync with Long Flash Animations”

  1. James Darracott on June 11th, 2008 4:16 am

    That works a treat. Very annoying how Flash loses sync, especially as I’m not an advanced user. For those who are having trouble finding a silent “sound” file, you can use the free audio editing tool Audacity. I’m using Flash 8 and it has solved my sync problem, so give it a try!

    Thanks!

  2. rbosinger on June 11th, 2008 1:53 pm

    That’s kind of funny. I wrote this post years ago when animating Vote4Oz (Vote4Oz.com) but I never ended up doing anything with it. I used this as almost a “test” post to get my blog started. Glad it could help you James!

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