Flash CS3 Export for Quicktime Small Gotcha.

Filed under Flash by Chad | 5 comments

This tripped me up for a couple minutes. With the release of Flash CS3, the export to Quicktime/AVI functionality was greatly improved. You can now create a video file directly from Flash that respects ActionScript, nested movie clips etc from the IDE. I wrote a post on this feature a while ago and have been using it fairly often. Found a little gotcha earlier today that made me stop and think… Tried to export a movie that was 69.5 seconds long. The time input field on Flash’s export window allows you to type in the time like such:

But, upon entering this information as specified above, you can no longer export the movie. No error message, no crash, nothing. A hint at the cause of the error is there glaring you in the face next to the field (a depiction of the input format expected)… (hh:mm:ss.msec) However, tabbing out of the field does not apply the mask to the field, nor does a warning message or automatic conversion or validation of the number occur. After a bit of head scratching, I suddenly recalled that 69.5 seconds was indeed 1 minute, 9.5 seconds and altered the input in the field accordingly, like so…

Voila. It worked. Now, I know, I know… I should have noticed the cue on the dialog box instructing me how to input the data and followed suit. I didn’t. Should Flash have recognized my ignorance and gave me a hand? One would hope so. So, lesson learned. If you want to have Flash output a movie based on the desired runtime you are looking to achieve (which seems to be necessary if you have deep nesting of movie clips or lots of ActionScript, etc), you must *gasp* do the math to convert the time from seconds to “time code-like” notation yourself. No help for you!

Little usability headaches like this cause a lot of support issues for Adobe, I’m sure. I would consider the lack of properly formatted discrete fields for the hour, minute, seconds values a bug. Without proper guidance from the UI or a mechanism to prevent the user from failure, the software fails to be easy to use.

Posted on April 7, 2008

5 comments

1. Jason Terhorst Apr 7

   If Adobe would use standard Cocoa controls as they’re supposed to, they would get field validation for free.

   Why didn’t they code in a conversion? When I enter “75″ minutes on my oven’s timer, it automatically switches the input to 1 hour, 15 minutes. All of these little quirks or lack of intelligent response make me frustrated when working with the Macromedia/Adobe apps on Mac OS X. Ironically, Microsoft is starting to learn and improve in this area on their Mac apps. C’mon, Adobe!

2. Turid Aug 24

   I was very happy to find this posting, thinking finally I´ve got the solution to my problem*. Sadly enough it didn´t work - pressing Export still gives result zero. Will try again, maybe I´ve misunderstood something?

   *By the way, here´s the problem:My fla-files are 3-4 min. long and synced to music.I have not been able to export both video and audio-track with reasonable quality. No problem, one would think, as the tracks can be mixed after export. Funny thing,though: when exported on it´s own, the video track gets longer than the original. A video track of say 3 min 7 secs mixed with an audio track of 3 minutes - no good!

3. Turid Aug 26

   OK - found that “after time elapsed” only works with export settings “Compression:None”.
   (The catch is that this makes it more likely that frames get dropped.)

4. Ken Oct 12

   I have a 3 minute .fla video presentation which I’m trying to convert to QT. (mac 10.5.5 / flash CS3) Nothing’s worked so far - including the above.

   could not complete operation because of an unknown error

   That’s what comes up. There’s lots of tweens in it but surely these scripts should be foolproof. Which is what I need it to be.

   Strangely enough one previous project did miraculously convert to .mov for me. So theoretically it can work.

   Might there be something else I’m not observing?

   regards - Ken

5. Christina Mar 10

   Is there any way I can export a flash file to quicktime without those standard controls?

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