Friday, May 05, 2006

Converting SWF to other video formats

This has always been one of the most used feature that a lot of TV Shows are gaining momentum in using Flash to animate it before airing on the TV. So there's probably a lot type of question on beginners that how they can convert the ever small .SWF file to ...let's say... an AVI file format?

The Freeware
http://www.pizzinini.net/projects/swf2avi/
Though I have not used this one yet, but I guess it could be one of the good one out there.

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LIMITATIONS

- no audio support
(simple workaround: record your windows stereo mix :)
- no support for compressed movies


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The Shareware
http://www.winmpg.com/SWF-to-AVI.html
http://www.flashants.com/root/swf2video.shtml
Not free but powerful, with support.

The Flash Itself
You can actually use the built in export function from the Flash interface itself, File--> Export Movie but there are of course certain limitations would occur from using that, and that's even if you're not using Quicktime Pro.

We'll discuss about audio export later, now we can come to the video itself, by using Flash export, it's easy, yes, but there are things you'll notice that the movie clips inside the main timeline, that normally has animation, doesn't play when exported and stopped at it's first frame. Why? I've yet to find an answer. But if you have everything animated on the main timeline, i guess you won't have any problem with it.

And as for the audio...
You can playback the SWF file, and while it's running...
1... You set your Recording Control's setting to Stereo Mix
2... Open or use any audio recording device, such as Adobe Audition, MySoundStudio etc etc.
3... Press record on your recording software and then fire up your SWF...
4... it will record whatever that is streaming on your pc at the moment, so make sure you turn off volume for all other application, if you have audio player running of course.

Combining the both
And after you get both output file, audio and video itself separately, you can now combine it with any video editing software, such as Adobe Premiere, or VirtualDub.

P.s. - not actually an official tutorial but more like a sharing. :D

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