Interesting Flash 8 bug...

Hey folks,

There's an interesting bug which appears to have been around in Flash for many versions. Remember those old "Get Info in the Finder" alerts that would pop up on Windows stations? Well, it seems to have been updated to say that Flash is low on memory and can't complete the operation requested. Seems to make more sense, right? Well, unfortunately it still doesn't tell you why this is happening. Here are a few reasons you might see this (please feel free to add more if you know of more possible reasons):

1) Raster images - often a corrupted, or badly-created, raster image (PNG, JPG, BMP, etc.) is in the library. Deleting this item from the library, if you can get to it, will usually allow you to open and work with the file again. Something as simple as opening up the original in Photoshop (or Painter, or The GiMP, or whatever) and then resaving will normally fix the file and allow you to import properly;

2) Corrupted layers - for some reason there was layer info in Flash MX and MX 2K4 that seems to be regarded as "corrupt" in Flash 8. Sometimes this causes files that you've opened to appear corrupt, or say that you've run out of memory, etc. Not to fear! Go back into MX 2K4, take those layers that you've created (be they in the library or on the timeline), copy their details onto a new layer, delete the old layer, and then Save and Compact. It's a pain, but usually it fixes the problem. If it didn't, chances are the problem lies with a symbol that's on the layer.

3) Bad video - this is pretty much like (1) - except that it's video instead of a raster image. Kill the video and you should be okay.

Normally the issue comes about when you don't compact your files. It's like not defragmenting your hard drive for, say, a few millenia. After a while, the info gets so messy that you can't properly compact. If you do a regular Save and Compact instead of just a Save, you should be able to avoid this problem altogether.

The folks at Macromedia are looking into this bug right now. Should I hear anything from them, I'll be certain to post info here.