Advice on Exporting Flash To Video

Question

Greetings everyone. I'm in a bit of a pickle. I promised a
client that I would be able to export the flash piece I did for
them into a Quicktime Movie. I am using Flash 8, and using many
Flash 8 only features (i.e. blending modes, blur filters). Now, I
know that Flash 8's Quicktime export can't support that stuff, but
I figured I'd export it as a PNG sequence, import the sequence into
Premiere and life would be grand.
HOWEVER, I'm also using Actionscript to create some particle
effects (fairy dust if you must know). And I just realized to my
horror that PNG Sequences, actually NOTHING, exports actionscripted
events. AAAGH!
So I wanted the forums opinions on the following options:
1. Does Flash CS3's export tools take Blending Modes,
Filters, and Actionscripted events into consideration? I'll upgrade
if I have to.
2. Is there a third party tool that can save images from a
published .SWF file? Like a screen capture tool?
3. Is there any way to pause a .SWF and advance it frame by
frame? I'm desperate enough to print screen every frame if I have
to...
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

flashants.com is where you can get the SWF2Video tool which
is also talked about in the artile I
wrote - what do you mean you couldn't see it?
The Quicktime Exporter is designed to export dynamic content
- so yes, in theory it will do what you
want - but beware - it is not perfect - in fact, if you have
a high frame rate (who doesn't) and a
lot of animation - forget about it. Here's my standard
copy/paste response to this feature:
Turn off audio. The audio in a Flash movie may also slow the
performance
possibly causing dropped frames. Turn off the audio, if you
have many
dropped frames in the first attempt. Other video editing
tools can be used
to add the audio to the video after export.
Reduce frame rate. If the movie dimension is a full size
NTSC video, 740 x
480, and frame rate is 30 fps, you are more likely to have
dropped frames.
Reduce the fps of Flash movie increase the chance of
grabbing all the
frames. Other video editing tools can be used to adjust the
frame rate of
the video after export.
Optimize your animation. Try to avoid a lot of screen
motion. The greater
the area of change on the screen, the more likely slowdown
will occur. Also,
if possible, restrict your use of transparency and alpha
channels as they
too can cause poor performance.
Use ActionScript 3. Animation created by ActionScript 2 and
ActionScript 3
are different in play back performance. Convert the
ActionScript in your
animation to ActionScript 3 for optimized performance.
Dimension settings in 2 places. The dimension settings in
Export Settings
dialog sets the dimension of the SWF movie to be captured.
The Size settings
in QuickTime Settings dialog sets the dimension of the
exported MOV files.
If the SWF size is smaller than the exported MOV size, the
picture quality
will be degraded; if it is larger than the exported MOV
file, you may have
better picture quality. For best quality (and often
performance) these
settings should match.
Most likely - you will experience dropped frames at best.
This feature is not perfect. SWF3Video
does an amazing job of converting SWF movies to AVI - it has
saved my *ss on many many many projects.
Chris Georgenes / mudbubble.com / keyframer.com / Adobe
Community Expert
Crowandazi wrote:
> Read the Flash To Video article, but didn't see the
SWF2Video section. Will
> take a look. Gracias! Just as an FYI for my decision to
upgrade, however, do
> you know about those features showing up in CS3's
export?
>
> Thanks!
>