Flash CS3′s “Export to Movie: Quicktime”, I Love You!
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post wondering how to get good movies out of Flash animations that contained nested movie clips. I got a response from Robert Penner reminding me of the new feature in Flash CS3 that does just that. After using some third party tools the last I needed to do it a couple years ago, I was really looking for then Macromedia, now Adobe to step up and add smarter export to Flash… And man, did they ever!
Multilevel nested animations exported flawlessly, and the quality was great. It didn’t take that long to output several 3 minute long animations. The “Recording Flash Player” progress bar that precedes the encoding progress bar was a little surprise… I’d love to know just how the feature works.
Furthermore, the new Flash Video Enocder shipping with CS3 seemingly transcoded the Animation:Millions+ Color movies faster than the previous version of my encoder by a good amount on my PowerBook G4. Not bad at all!
I just love it when a plan comes together.
Posted on May 10, 2007
Chris May 11
I’m really looking forward to checking this feature out…(once my company upgrades to CS3). In fact, just 2 days ago a co-worker of mine had built out a 4 minute animation full of nested movie clips and loaded with mcTween animations that was going to be burned to a DVD for presentation. During the 11th hour she realized it wasn’t exporting out to quicktime as she had expected. If we had CS3, there wouldn’t have been any issue at all and it would have saved me the headache of figuring a work around for the client.
Atom May 9
I am using the flash CS3 export to quicktime feature to export action script driven animation and it does produce anomalies in the rendering, it is not flawless. I have a quad processor and the capture render portion still drops frames and produces render anomalies when objects move off the edge of the stage/screen.
Sarah May 30
I have had success with this feature in flash; however, right now I have 6 files I’m trying to export to .mov. It starts just fine, and appears to be working, but it never finishes the export. Any tips? I’m a novice in flash, and I don’t even know where to start.
Chad May 31
Sarah, the issue yo are experiencing is fairly common. To solve it, you must enter the explicit duration of the movie you are trying to output. Most likely you have some actionscript or something that is not ending by itslef, so becuase of that your movie export never completes. If you take a look at the total number of frames your nested clips have and then divide that by your frame rate, it should give you a pretty good idea of the duration of the movie you need to export. Hope this helps. I have another post about this feature here: http://visualrinse.com/2008/04/07/flash-cs3-export-for-quicktime-small-gotcha/
Cheril Seidel Feb 8
Hi Chad,
I have followed your instructions above, with the time format: 00:00:4.1 sec (4.1 secs) but still cannot get it to export.
The irony is, I have been exporting to .mov without any hiccups on other files.
It was not until I went into settings that I had any trouble.
Can you suggest anything else?
Chad Feb 8
Cheril,
Try this…
00:00:04.100
Does that work?
Alexander Oct 4
I was looking for this blog for long now. I know it´s a little bit old but we still working with this feature and noboy could help me till now. But now I got your blog and know how it works. Thanks a lot.