Converting Flash .swf Animations For NLE Editing

If you own QuickTime 4 Pro & Adobe Photoshop (or similar paint program) there is a two-stage process to convert & resize .swf movies (vector based movies meant for internet animation because of their small data size) so you can use them in your video editing program (using sequential bitmap based movies which have a much larger data size)(see details below). If you own Macromedia's Flash program ($399) http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash   you may also be able to convert the .swf movie over to sequential bitmaps too. The original native file format of Macromedia Flash is an .fla file. If you have access to the original .fla file & the Macromedia Flash program, that would often be better than an .swf movie file because .fla files are editable in Flash (individual elements are editable) & because the resolution is crisper & because it will retain all elements. With .swf movies the components of the movie are often "locked" & not editable.

QUICKTIME PLAYER CONVERSION: The Pro version of QuickTime 4 is identical to the free version except that when you pay Apple $29.99 http://www.apple.com/quicktime  they will give you a key number that turns on the "exporting" feature, allowing you to save or export. In the QuickTime 4 Pro Player, simply open the .swf movie (file/open movie). Then menu under File/Export & select the "export" format as "movie to image sequence", then click on the "options" button & select either BMP or TGA as the file format, select the frame rate you use in your NLE system, click ok & save to your systems drive (you'll need lots of systems hard drive space, about 30 MB per second). One caution, QuickTime Pro does not see movies within movies in a .swf file, so certain elements of a .swf movie might not be seen when QuickTime Pro converts to a sequential file.

PHOTOSHOP BATCH RESIZING: Now that you have a sequential series of frames, open Photoshop & batch resize them to the size your NLE system requires (for many NTSC systems that's 720X486). To batch resize in Photoshop, you first need to create an "action" script by clicking on the "Actions" tab on the right side of the screen (if it isn't visible menu under Window/Show Actions), then go to the small icon just to the left of the garbage can (if you hold your mouse over it, the name will say "Create new action") & click on it. Give your action a name (like "scale 300X400 to 486X720") & click on record. Next open up the first frame of your sequential movie & then under image/image size, resize it to the size you need for your NLE (constrain proportions off). Now go over to the "actions" box again & click on the square black "Stop" button to stop recording this action (don't save the frame you just resized). Now to actually do the batch scaling, menu under File/automate/batch & pick the correct action, set the source & destination folders & click on ok. Photoshop will now automatically batch resize each frame. You might get a better explanation of how to batch resize in the Photoshop help file.

If the .swf flash movie was not already at about a 4 units wide by 3 units high ratio, then you may also have to first set up an action to crop or pad (canvas) the frame so that it is a 4:3 ratio to help keep it aspect correct.

Note that when doing an automated batch of sequential files where the virtual files of the P drive on a DPS NLE card are the source, it seems to miss the first file (perhaps I am doing something wrong). This bug doesn't seem to occur when converting sequential file from a systems drive.

By Doug Hembruff.
Last updated January 28/2001