flash 8 to quicktime

Does anyone have a sure fire method for converting Flash 8 animations to QT? I'm working with a gal who has done an animation for me but after supposedly converting the file to Quicktime from Flash 8, all hell breaks loose. The files play wonderfully in QT player and all is well, but after rendering in a DV NTSC timeline part of the animation is lost and no matter what she does we can't find a solution. File is always 730 wide too no matter how much she shrinks it. I don't know Flash and wonder if there is some setting she needs to know about when converting.

Obviously what is happening is that the file remanins a Flash file in a Quicktime wrapper

I hate messing with codecs. Screen-cap the beast.

Ian

That would take snaps pro. Good idea though. But there has got to be a solution other than that I'd hope

ok what exactly is the workflow here?

is she sending you a swf that you are opening in QT player? thats almost a guranteed loser.

or is she exporting a QT movie out of flash?

<<<converting the file to Quicktime>>>

It's no surprise that "converting to QuickTime" doesn't tell you anything and may not have done a whole lot of good.

Talking like the non-editor I am, I would have converted (from Flash Player??) to a specific compressor within QuickTime like (our personal favorite) Photo JPEG, Excellent Quality and **force** the picture size and other attributes.

You are converting from within QuickTime Pro, right, or does your Flash Player have an export option. If it's Flash, convert it again.

It's when you give QuickTime it's lead (auto everything), you could get a movie with a lot of the same attirbutes that the orignal file had, gaining you very little or nothing.

Another thing to try is [Apple]-I at the movie in QuickTime Player to get it to tell you what *it* thinks you have. The oddball frame sizes should certainly show up there.

Koz

i would have you suggest to her:

from her fla timeline, choose export > export movie > quick time video

there she can select the size and quality. id suggest 24bit color either animation or photojpeg at the highest quality on the slider.

She is exporting from Flash 8 to Quicktime and not sure what settings. However I'll ask her to do as you say Wayne and see if that helps. You might be both right here. Photojpeg might be the way to go but its going into a DV NTSC sequence FWIW

<<<its going into a DV NTSC sequence FWIW.>>>

The extra trip to a different format might do y'all a world of good.

Koz

OK, when im exporting from Flash 8 Professional(i don;t know if there is a difference for non-pro), I go to file - export movie

then select quicktime video instead of just quicktime

i personally use the animation codec since i use it to integrate with AE primarily but DV NTSC is there, her document size will determine the video size but you can scale up or down in the video options....

Here is an example of Flash video integration...

[www.benscottproductions.com]

***crap i just realized this had already been answered, oh well...***



Post Edited (06-27-06 14:10)

Thats very cool Scott. Great job.

I'll send her all these suggestions and see what happens and report back. Thanks for the help all.

My question is how do you go from QT to Flash ? Is Sorenson Squeeze the only way or the best way? And how should you prepare the .mov file when getting ready for Flash?

Flash 8 includes the new Flash Video Encoder program, its a mini-compressor type program but with limited presets. They also introduced a new codec(on2 VP6) which is pretty decent quality and streams pretty well. However, the best part is you have the option to encode video with an Alpha channel for use in Flash. That's my next big project, I want to walk all over my website. Just need to set up a green screen.


Also, i just remembered that in the Export - QT Conversion menu, there is an option to export as Flash Video. It opens a mini-version of the encoder but doesn't allow for batch renders. I think you prob need to have the Flash8 program installed for this option. As far as preperation, i noticed that files i had already compressed for the web took far shorter time that files still in DV or Animation.

Samples of QT to Flash video can be found here...

[www.benscottproductions.com]

These have been stretched inside Flash to fit the window so don't judge the quality so much. The original .FLV's were 320-240 but are obviously larger now, still, i think they look pretty decent.

Well got the animation to work finally but for reasons I don't really understand. She is working off a Windows version of Flash 8 pro and there are none of the options any of you told me to tell her. There is no QT video option and only Quicktime. So we added 10 seconds to the animation and all is well. Sort of gave it time to complete the animation.

Anyway it works but not sure why.