Help with Lag after Video Export

[lillies]

Hi, I've made flash animation videos before, but the longest one was 15 seconds, so I've never had a problem. But now I'm making an animated music video that is 3 minutes and 6 seconds long. The video looks great when I preview the swf, but when I export it as a mov, the frames lag, and when I export as an avi, they lag even more. I need it to look exactly the same as I have it in my original flash document, because otherwise, the music and lyrics don't synch up with the animations (like mouth movements in signing). What is the solution to do this? Please, I'm getting very frustrated. There are tons of shorts out there, but I can't seem to find any information on how to fix this. I've heard about cutting the timeline to make clips and then putting everything back together in Windows Movie Maker, but I have over 2,000 frames so cutting won't do. Please, how is this fixed? I'm using Adobe Flash CS3. Thanks for any help.

[ElusiveMoose]

Flash has always had issues with exporting to avi and/or Quicktime. Flash CS3 improved the Quicktime export on Windows, but it's still not perfect. How it works in CS3 is that it loads the swf into memory and plays it back in realtime while the Quicktime codec does a virtual screen capture of the swf and encapsulates it into a Quicktime movie. The problem here is that this is a major draw on the computers resources and when the cpu gets a little behind in the swf, it'll lag and/or skip frames. Quicktime export is really only useful for extremely simple swfs.

So, how do you get your movie into a useable movie format. The standard way has been to export the movie as a sequence of images (preferably png's). Then import the sequence into a video editor, assemble the images (should be automatic in most editors), and remix/sync the audio. It's kind of a pain, but it'll give you the best quality results with perfect audio sync and zero lag/dropped frames.

One caveat, though, is that any movie clips and/or actionscript will not export properly when going to a sequence of images, so if you've used either of these, you'll have to go through and change all MC's to Graphic Symbols and figure out how to get rid of the actionscript.

That's about it.

The only other option would be to buy a 3rd party program like swf2vid by a company called flashants (www.flashants.com). I've never used it, but have heard many good things about it, and it's supposed to support Movie Clips in the export.

Good luck. I hope you'll post your video when it's done.

[vicjperry]

I had the same problem once and it seems to me that it was a frame rate issue. I made an animation that was 12fps and it had mp3's imported into it. I think an mp3 needs something like 26-30fps to play in a flash movie.

Small mp3 clips are okay but if you have an entire song, then your flash frame rate has to match. I read somewhere that Flash will force the timeline to work in movie preview but it's a different story once you export it as an avi or mov.

I wish I knew where I read that stuff as it would help you a lot better than this confusing babble!:banghead