Anima

I gave up on exporting Adobe Flash movies years ago, for two reasons. Because the final movie looked so fuzzy / bad / compressed, and because my movieclips didn’t play at all (I thought i’d have to do every animation as new keyframes, with no repeated clips). I’ve figured out both of these problems (and will include export settings below).

1) The reason my exported movies looked like crap, no matter what compression type I chose, was that “Key Frames:” was set to a specific number, instead of being left to Automatic. (I think it was set to 5). As I understand it, when compressing a movie export, the Key Frame count controls how many times per second a perfect image is stored in the sequence. Every other frame between keys will be a derivative, and look fuzzier. (am I wrong? is it key frames per entire clip now, or something? comment below. please!)

(at right i’ve embedded an image that shows the same movie clip export, with the only difference being a specific number for “Key Frames:”. lower down is a screenshot of all the relevant Flash export settings)

The idea when I started messing with digital movie compression (in 1998) was to try pick a key frame count which would only put a new keyframe every time a major change happened in your video. If there was no movement in the frame, you would ideally just have a keyframe at the start of each new shot. the in between frames could be minor derivatives, and verrrry small. But it seems that trying to second guess the compressor is no longer wise. Just set the key framing to be automatic, and focus on the dumbed down “quality” slider.

2) “MovieClip” objects still won’t play when you export a movie. BUT. you just need to make them “Graphic” objects. oops. easy.

-warren (thanks to Lilly for picking and screen capturing our ideal compression settings)