One of my biggest peeves about Flash is its various hit or miss methods for exporting video. In version 8 and earlier Flash would create a file made up of a series of frame by frame image captures with the soundtrack recorded separately and laid on top. This worked fine, except it didn’t record animations inside of MovieClips or created by ActionScript. It only recorded whatever could be rendered in real time in the authoring environment. In other words, just Graphic symbols. Adobe revamped video export in CS3 to allow both MCs and AS animation to be captured by recording the the SWF output in realtime. The problem with this method was that if your movie dropped frames in FlashPlayer it was going to hiccup in the video output as well. Here’s a way to finally have both performance and your full movie in video form. More »
The Definitive Guide to Exporting Video From Flash
The Inflexible Professional
Professional graphics people are a strange lot. On the one hand they embrace many technologies as they appear. Newer and better lenses and imagine sensors, higher DPI scanners and tablets, faster graphics cards, and rarely is a favorite app not upgraded as soon as the new version is released. But like audiophiles who cling to their vinyl, graphics folks can’t let go of their computer displays. Every time there is a major change in displays you will inevitably find a very angry and nearly fundamentalist vocal minority of graphic pros followed by hordes of mimicking amateurs complaining that the new tech is inferior. The difference between the graphic pro and the audiophile is that eventually the graphic pro caves to the new tech and then grows to have enough love for it to hate the very next thing as much as they hated what they are currently using at the time that it came out. What in the world is the cause of this bizarre behavior? More »