Exporting to PNG Sequence
Exporting to PNG Sequence
In many situations, animation exported from Flash is often imported to Adobe After Effects for additional effects to be added. To ensure frame accuracy during the exporting and
Even though guide layers are not visible within the Flash Player,
importing process, the PNG sequence is preferred among they will export to a PNG sequence
many postproduction professionals. When your animation unless their visibility is turned off
in Flash is complete and you’re ready to export it, there as well. You could delete these lay-
may be a few things you’ll want to do first: For example, ers, but it may be advantageous to
keep them for future editing if the make sure you’re using Graphic symbols (not Movie Clips)
Flash document will be reused. and turn off the visibility of your guide layers that con- tain graphics that you do not want exported in the final sequence. Be sure to hide any title and action safety layers, and any extraneous graphics (Figure 5.50).
Figure 5.50 Turn off the visibility of any guide layers when exporting to
a PNG sequence.
Depending on the length of your animation, a PNG sequence will contain several individual image files. The number of files can range from a few to several hundred or
Some of the memory issues men- even thousands. It is best practice to break down your ani- tioned may be a thing of the past,
mation into different Flash documents based on scenes or since Flash CS5 has transitioned
even camera shots. It is typical to have several short anima- from a binary format to an open
tions as individual FLA files, as opposed to one long Flash format based on XML, but it’s better
to be safe than sorry. Additionally, it document to avoid memory issues, crashes, and corrupt is a good idea to back up your work
files. Based on our past experience, individual FLA files frequently, because there’s nothing
should range from two seconds to, at the most, one minute more frustrating than losing hours
in duration. Each of these files can then be edited together of work. using video editing software such as Adobe Premiere or
Adobe After Effects. To export your animation to a PNG sequence, follow
these steps:
Chapter 5 Sharing Your Animation
1. Choose File > Export > Export Movie (Figure 5.51).
Figure 5.51 The Export menu.
2. In the Format menu within the Export Movie dialog box, choose PNG Sequence (Figure 5.52).
Figure 5.52 The Format menu within the Export Movie dialog box.
3. Create a new folder or select a folder already created for Flash to export the image to, and then click Save
(Figure 5.53).
Figure 5.53 Save to an empty folder using the Export Movie dialog box.
Animation with Scripting for Adobe Flash Professional CS5 Studio Techniques
4. You will be prompted with PNG-specific encoding settings. Click OK to generate the image sequence
(Figure 5.54).
Figure 5.54 The PNG-specific export settings allow you to define the image encoding settings.
It is best practice to export each image sequence to its own folder. This helps keep each sequence organized and man- ageable (Figure 5.55).
Figure 5.55 The generated sequence of PNG files is stored in its own directory. The export methods discussed so far work great for files
that simply contain animation, but there may be some situ- ations in which you’ll need to export dynamically created (i.e., code-driven) animation to video.