Opening Flash CS6 files with Animate

As introduced in CS5, Animate continues to support XFL file format, both as a compressed .fla and the uncompressed .xfl file types. Animate also continues to support opening of files last saved in any, earlier version of Animate. Supported file types include opening not only the XFL files saved in  CS5.5, and CS6, but also the older “binary” .fla files saved in CS4 and earlier.

When saving a file, Animate continues to provide the options of saving to a Animate document (.fla) or uncompressed document (.xfl). The resulting XFL file is internally stamped with the Animate file version. However, since CS5.5 and later releases are able to open “future” versions of XFL files, CS5.5 and CS6 can both also open Animate files. Consequently, you will not see options in the Save As Type drop-down list to explicitly save to an older version of Animate.

However, as will be described below, some features are deprecated in Animate. This may affect files that were created with older versions of Animate. It is important that you make necessary changes to these files with an older version of Animate, before opening them in Animate.

If you open a file, previously saved with an earlier version of Animate, you may encounter a feature that is no longer supported in Animate. And a warning message indicating the same is displayed. When you affirm that you want to continue with the conversion, Animate will automatically convert the deprecated content into a supported content type. Note that Animate will display a warning if this occurs, so that you can save with a different file name. This allows you to keep an archive copy of the original file with the original content intact.

In converting the deprecated features, Animate attempts to preserve the original content visually. However, after converting some of the functionality available with the original content may not be available:

1. Inverse Kinematics are converted to frame-by-frame animations
2. TLF text is converted to classic, static text. TLF text embedded within PSD or AI files are also converted to classic text when imported in Animate.
3. ActionScript 1 / ActionScript 2:
   1. Publish Settings is defaulted to ActionScript 3
   2. AS2 code attached to any instance on stage will be removed (because actions on instances is not supported in AS3)
   3. AS2 components will be carried forward as placeholders, but cannot be used to create new content on stage. Also, they will generate compile errors in AS3.