Exporting Flash As A Quicktime Movie
Since the release of Flash CS3, a new feature called QuickTime export was introduced. QuickTime export allows you to export Actionscript driven or timeline animations into a QuickTime movie file. One key advantage of exporting Flash as a QuickTime movie is the ability to playback your heavy animations as fluid as possible with no skipped frames.
Lee Brimelow walks you through the process of exporting ActionScript-based animations into a QuickTime movie and then compositing it within After Effects. In the process of demonstrating this feature, Lee also gives some additional advice with ActionScript-based animations.
If you are in a hurry, follow the steps below to quickly get your Flash content exported into a Quicktime Movie.
1. Open Flash File
Open your existing Flash file that contains the animation.
2. Export Your Movie
By heading over to the file navigation menu, select Export>Export Movie which should bring up a file dialog.
3. Name/Save File
Provide our new video with a file name and a new location. Select Quicktime as your movie type. Note: Quicktime is the only format that will allow you to export ActionScript driven animations.
4. Configure Export Settings
Configure the export settings to your specifications
5. Export and Enjoy
Click export and wait for your Flash to record your Flash animation. Note: For improved video playback and recording, close down any open applications till the recording process is complete. The more resources available – the better.
24 Comments
dennis
01.08.2009
i’ve been wondering how to do this! thanks a lot
Angel
01.08.2009
No Problem! I think many people may have wanted to do this at some point or another.
Jeffrey Frenandez
01.19.2009
Thanks a lot! Nice blog
Angel
01.25.2009
No Problem, Jeffrey.
john24
02.06.2009
Yes, thanks a lot! This is very help
Angel
02.06.2009
No Problem! Stick around there is a lot more to come!
LoLot
05.15.2009
hey man, i have Flash CS4 and i cant export my animation to the quicktime extension.. every time i do this, when i open the .mov file that was created it only shows the first frame!!! im going crazy! what am i doing wrong????
please help me :..(
miah
06.12.2009
heheheh 65 seconds = 1 minute 15 seconds??? heheheh!
Sara
06.25.2009
I had the same problem because I had my entire animation in a movieclip, and then I had just placed the single frame of the movieclip on the main stage. I realized that if you export to quicktime, you need to put as many frames on the main stage as there are in the movie. So, for instance, my movie was 1850 frames, so I put the clip on the main stage and added a frame at frame 1850.
Now I’m trying to figure out haw to make the quicktime movie smaller, because it’s turning a 1mb .swf into a 70mb .mov! If anyone can help with this, let me know. Thanks.
Angel
06.25.2009
You can use Adobe Media Encoder or any other similar tool to compress the movie down using a enhanced codec. Hope this helps!
Fred
07.20.2009
Export to Quicktime from Flash is ridiculous as it only allows you to export as flash player v5 or lower.
LoLot – that’s why it’s only exporting the first frame. When you export in v5, bitmaps look like garbage and you can’t include any blending effects. That or what Sara mentioned – you need to have enough frames on the main timeline to accommodate any movieclip instances.
Come on Adobe – get with it – this is terrible.
Angel
07.22.2009
You can always use the “Stop exporting after time elapsed”. What do you mean “it only allows you to export as Flash Player v5 or lower.”
Lst_Hwn
08.28.2009
I have a problem where I have an animation with lipsyncing and sound effects that gets all out of sync when exported to quicktime.
When I preview each individual scene in flash they all play fine. But occasionally when I publish the whole movie to a .swf file certain scenes get messed up. Sounds loop when they are only supposed to play onces, frames get repeated or played at a super fast frame rate.
The same thing seems to happen when I try and export it as a Quicktime file. I’m not sure what to do at this point. It’s really fustrating and I have a deadline fast approaching.
nazawon
04.22.2010
anyone solved this problem yet? I'm having the same problem.
nemo
09.14.2010
Deadline is probably over, but i've had this problem many times myself. Usually what causes it is the sounds being in nested movieclips with timelines shorter than the main timeline. If your sounds are contained in nested movieclips, these clips are probably reaching the end of their timeline before the animation is finished, then looping back to the beginning. You can either fix this with actionscript to stop playing the sound, or simply make sure that each nested movieclip's timeline is exactly as long as the main timeline. Hope this helps someone.
Nick
10.26.2009
Thanks for the info
I was trying to export to avi, but the actionscript code was not working. This is good solution.
Navinder
11.06.2009
Hi…thnx for the tips for exporting flash file to quick time movie..
we can compress the quick time movie size using compressor(mac)
Greg
01.14.2010
I’m exporting a QuickTime mov from flash and it’s been about an hour. Is this normal?
JV Hernandez
04.16.2010
Thank you for this! This really really helped.
hdc
05.28.2010
thanx!
Drew
08.26.2010
I found that any AS code will mess up the animation export. I had a "stop();" called at the end of the animation. When I deleted the entire code, I found that I could export in no time.
I used CS4 export to MOV settings, no sound, and to stop exporting after last frame was reached. 240 frames long at 30 fps. Completed in a minute and ready in a working .mov file! The flash file was on the desktop, and not a server, and exported back to desktop. No problem finally!!
Thanks all!
thetoolsman
11.10.2010
Guys, just take out any form of actionscript on the timeline and the export from flash to quicktime will work perfectly.
toonlady
11.23.2011
If you have intensive timeline animation with many keyframes and sounds set your original file up at 29.97 fps then in the export window make sure you chose that option. No a.s can be in the timeline or qt won’t work from CS4 on. You will no longer get artifactng or dropped frames. 29.97 is QT ‘s native frame rate.
crissyb
01.06.2012
Thanks to Sara for the movie clip tip! That worked for me while converting my 13 frame fla, with 13 movie clips, into an iPad compatible file. So I made a layer for each swf and extended each layer out to the end of the frames needed for that swf and was able to then export each layer to a .mov which will then be strung together in Quicktime for the final product! Thank you Sara.
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