A Marketing Student's Blog

As part of a project at work, I’ve been trying to export from Adobe Flash CS5.1 to Quicktime Movie (.mov) output. Instead of exporting at the same quality that was displayed in Flash itself, the file exported with hideous artifacts that rendered it useless.

This is an example of the artifacts in a .mov export:

I had to get this document exported, and found a workaround – be it clunky.

Modify your Flash

It was evident that the text was causing most of the problems, and therefore I converted all text from Adobe’s new TLF format, to Classic Text. This got rid of the problems of artifacting text tweens. For any graphics that you have, ensure they are converted to the correct type of symbol – graphic, movie or button.

Use a different export method


Instead of exporting directly to Quicktime .mov, I used export to JPEG image sequence. Exporting to an image sequence means that flash will create a JPEG image for every frame in your flash document – yes file sizes can be large. I used a 90% quality setting – this saved a lot of space and didn’t noticably affect output quality.

I then opened the image sequence using Quicktime 7 pro. This application isn’t pre-bundled with Macs running Lion, so you will have to download it from here. Once Quicktime is open, click File> Open Image Sequence and select the first image that flash generated. Once Quicktime opens the image sequence you can save the file in any format that you like. I would recommend using an Mpeg compression to maximise cross-platform compatibility.

Key points

• Avoid TLF text – using classic text for text tweens.
• Ensure that all media is converted to it’s appropriate format in Flash – button, movie, or graphic.
• Play around with export methods and consider using an image sequence export.