This is probably pretty basic, but I can't find
anything in the Flash Bible or on Macromedia's
support site that pertains to this specific
problem.

I'm animating some type (not a text block or
field), having it fade in and out. The type is a
series of short phrases, all of which have been
converted to symbols, and the fade is done using
brightness, not alpha.

The effects look great in the editing window,in
the test window, and in the standalone flash
player - but once the swf is placed in an html
page, and plays in the browser, the type is
aliasing horribly - it looks all scraggly, is
barely readable until just before the animation
stops, and then it suddenly clears up and
antialiases beautifully again. This same effect
is also evident on some of my animated vector
objects, but is not as pronounced there.

(I'm using Flash 4, on Win 98, have tried
exporting to both Flash 3 and Flash 4 formats,
setting quality to "High" or Auto=High", it
doesn't seem to make a difference. Problem is
evident in both Netscape and IE).

Oh, yes, here's the really odd part - I've applied
this effect nine times in the course of the movie,
and even in the browser it looks fine the first
few times, then the type starts breaking up on the
third or fourth time, and continues to break up
through the rest of the movie until just before
all the animation stops. I've checked and
re-checked, but I can't find anything different
about the particular frame where the problem
starts to occur - there's nothing happening at
that point on any other layers that isn't
happening before & after as well. And just to
add to my confusion, the problem doesn't always
occur at exactly the same frame - when I hit the
browser's "reload" (or "refresh") button, the next
time the movie plays, the aliasing can start or
end up to five or six frames from where it
originally appeared.

You can see the swf here.

Anyone have a clue what's causing this?

thanks,

Duncan

[This message was edited by Duncan Eagleson on September 15, 2000 at 01:17 PM.]