How to converting a flash clip into a bmp file quickly

Question

Hi,
I’d like to get help on converting a flash clip into a
bmp file. I have an application developed with ActiveX technology.
There is a flash control embedded in the ActiveX control, which has
a printing button. The end users can press the printing button to
print the flash picture as well as other text content.
I get the flash picture for printing in follow steps:
1.Create a BitmapData object
var bmp:BitmapData = new BitmapData(w, h, false);
2.Obtain the image of current flash
bmp.draw(mc, mc.transform.matrix, new ColorTransform(), 1,
new Rectangle(x, y, w, h));
3.Get pixels of flash image one by one in loop, and save them
into a PixelCollection
bmp.getPixel(col, row);
4.Move the PixelCollection into flash container
fscommand("print", load_PixelCollection);
5.Ocx control gets the PixelCollection and converts it into
BMP format
But I find it is very slow when action script gets pixels one
by one. Getting pixels of a middle size flash may spend one minute.
It is hard for our customer to stand. Does anyone have idea to get
the flash image quickly?　
Any help is appreciated.
Shi Hang

Answer 1

What about the built-in print methods, wouldn't it be better
to use those here?
Getting all pixel values is a time intensive process, because
of the amount of pixels. It may be a bit faster if you split the
getPixel() loop over some frames, but I'm not exactly sure how to
do that (just read it somewhere).
If the content is fixed, you could create the pixel array in
the background while the user looks at it. This is quite some
overhead, but when the user decides to print, the array would
already be there.
Finally, not helpful here, but interesting:
quote:
BitmapData.getPixels()
No longer do you have to loop through every pixel in a
bitmap, one at a time with getPixel to send a bitmap to the server.
This method returns a ByteArray containing the hexadecimal color
value of each of the pixels in the specified rectangular region of
a bitmap. Use this method in conjunction with the new ZLib
compression method; ByteArray.compress() to compress and send a
bitmap over the wire to a server so it can be converted into a file
ready for downloading.
(from
http://www.flashguru.co.uk/actionscript-3-new-capabilities/)
This will be available in AS 3.
hth,
blemmo