I wanted, nay, needed to export a movie I was working on in 720p resolution. I thought I had everything ready to go. My project’s stage was not 1280×720, but it was a 16:9 ratio (711×400). My logic was, keep the stage small to save on memory and processor power while working and export to the larger size. All my content is vectors, so it should have scaled up smoothly just fine. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way.

Flash never ceases to surprise and delight me with its ability to do the unexpected and just plain weird. When doing an image capture, as well as the old preAdobe method of video export, no matter what the size of your stage your output would come out crisp and clean even if it was five times the original’s size. In other words, it used the power of scalable vector’s appropriately. Flash’s new video export doesn’t seem to work that way. When I exported to a larger size using the “Quicktime Properties” box my end product would come out pixelated. It was a head scratcher. I thought maybe I was using the wrong compression scheme, but Animation set to “high” should have been as clear as uncompressed. Even Uncompressed 8bit was giving me blocky results.

  
Flash’s upscaled video export on the left and its upscaled image export on the right.

What I finally realized is that Flash was doing the unthinkably insane. It was exporting the video at the stage size and THEN upscaling it rather than upscaling the vectors and then recording them. Holy crap. I have no idea why Adobe would set things up this way. My clue to the solution is that in the original export dialog the render width and height is set, unchangeably, to the stage size. The Quicktime sub settings – like size, compression, and filters – were only applied tp the recording post render.

The completely useless QuickTime export size settings are only applied after Flash has recorded the video track.

Basically, in order to get your video to the correct size and resolution you need to work with a stage of the same size. I wound up having to resize all the elements in my movie so that I would get a crisp export. Krom forbid I ever need to export this thing in 1080p should I want to put it on Bluray as well as YouTubeHD. This could all be easily solved if the export dialog’s render settings were changeable. Thanks, Adobe, for not understanding the very nature of vector graphics. No wonder SVG was a failure.

Flash’s video render size settings are no longer changeable for no apparent reason than to annoy me.