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SWFShot v0.1 Released. Save Images of SWFs Greater Than 2880 Pixels
I sometimes need big images out of my flash files. By big, I mean larger than the 2880×2880 maximum size allowed by the Flash player. It just so happens that Flex has a way around it, and so SWFShot was born. Read on to learn more and download it.
The ImageSnapshot class in in Flex allows you to capture much larger images than the previous limit. You can encode the images as PNG or JPG and then, with Adobe AIR, you can save the image captured to the local system.
I saw the FITC post that Flash player 10 will bump up that limit. That’s great. I’m psyched. But, I also know that many people could use this functionality now, so, here it is. SWFShot. Flash Player 10 is at least a little ways off, so 2880 is the max from Flash for now.
Install it now, using the sweet new AIR plugin for wordpress written by Peter Elst.
If for some reason that installer badge doesn’t work use this link.
A few things. I did have a few more features planned for the app, scaling, filters, and some simple playhead controls… But in the interest of getting it out there and letting people play with it, I’ve decided to sideline some of those features for now. Also, the app seems to work well with images up to about 8000×8000, but I haven’t really tested it past that. Furthermore, JPGs, PNGs and AS1/AS2 Flash files have no real problems as far as I can see, but I did observe that some AS3 Flash files that directly access stage properties currently trigger the AIR security sandbox and will hang the app. I hope to have that fixed soon, too.
Sidenotes… this all sprung out of the fact that in creating a video thumbnail generator in Flex (it crawls the duration of the clip, creates bitmaps of them and them puts them on stage for quick review), I discovered ImageSnapshot. A fantastically helpful little class in the Flex 3 SDK, it’s noticeably absent from Flash. I blogged this last week. Today, Aral Balkan tweeted about a similar concern about the growing chasm between AS/MXML/Flex/Flash features and the things that one IDE has that another doesn’t. Another quick example…
In Flex you can do this…
container.removeAllChildren();
In Flash you can’t, so you have to do something like this…
while(container.numChildren){ container.removeChildAt(0); }
I would agree that these discrepancies lead to confusion when you jump back and forth between the environments. What about you? Having difficulties living in a multitool Flash platform that seems to be getting a bit more difficult to navigate? With the AIR function being rolled into the standard AS3 documentation on top of all this, there is yet just another thing for you to keep track of.
Anyway. Enjoy, play with it and let me know what you think.
Posted on April 27, 2008
Web tutorials Jun 12
well personally i have never had the need for bigger images than 2880 x 2880, but this is a cool tool, i may install to play around with it and find some uses for it in the future.