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.

I touched on methods and problems of exporting video from Flash in my Flash CS4 review. My solution at the time was to create an image sequence and a sound track rip separately and then join them together in either Quicktime Pro or Adobe After Effects. This simulated the method of Macromedia era versions of Flash, except Flash used to do the combination legwork itself and the output would a single MOV or AVI. Neither method allowed for MCs or AS animation. AS animation is, of course, the only way to make a descent star field. My new method still requires a separate video and audio file and third party software to put them together, but allows MC and AS animation with the full performance you expect from video.

The trick is to reduce your framerate to something extremely low before export, like 5 fps. At this speed Flash is unlikely to drop frames or make any other kind of performance related errors.

Export as a Quicktime and choose the advanced settings. Make sure you are only exporting video and not audio. If you export audio it will still play at the points in your movie where it’s supposed to, but it will be playing at normal speed compared to your slowed down movie. So save the audio for later. Configure all your aspect ratio and compression settings to taste and export.

Next bring your movie’s framerate back up to the original and go through the movie export sequence again, but this time export only the audio.

Now you’re going to need an expensive piece of video editing software. Quicktime Pro won’t cut it because it can’t resample your slow ass movie’s framerate back up to normal (as far as I know). In this case I’ll be using Adobe’s own After Effects, which most 2D animators seem to have a copy of laying around. Start a new composition and make sure to set the dimensions and framerate to match the movie you are importing. Import Multiple Files from the file menu and select your video and audio files. Both will show up in the Project Library panel.

Right click the video output file in the library and choose Interpret Footage –> Main… Click the “Conform to framerate” radio button and set the value to your movie’s normal framerate. Boom! Your footage is back to normal speed. Now drag both the audio and video into the timeline and make sure they are lined up on the timeline. If there is a little extra of one or the other at the end don’t worry about it.

 

 
Now add the comp to your Render Que, adjust your export settings, and hit the render button. In a matter of minutes to hours you’ll have a full AS and MC capable video render of your movie and in only 20 steps and several hundred dollars worth of software more than it used to take! Ain’t progress grand?