If anyone has ever ran into this problem, you will run into it no longer. The other day I attempted to export a flash animation to Quicktime using H.264 compression. Key word being “attempted”. The progress bar for “Recording Flash Content” would go all the way to the end and then hang up, waiting indefinitely to get to the “Compressing Quicktime”. I continued to try over and over without luck. I even went to different machines, tweaked the export settings and looked online for similar instances of the problem…with no luck.
Finally, I found a post for a temporary fix to the problem. Choose the “After time elapsed:” setting to the length of the movie you are exporting (ie. You have a 1:22 duration animation so you would type that in the after time elapsed). That was great but I was determined to find the way to make it work using “When last frame is reached”…then it hit me. When the last frame is reached…the flash file was of a freelancer and I hadn’t look through the file. As I took a pass, I saw the problem. If you have a “stop();” in your AS layer and still have frames after it, even if they are completely blank, it will cause the “Recording Flash Content” to hang. I tested this theory a few times and realized that it was the problem.
Afterwards, I thought what if someone has multiple stops and they are there for a purpose? Let’s say you have 4 frames in your timeline and they all contain stops along with commands to wait for something on the stage to finish its action. Will it hang up then? No. I tested with a setInterval to see if I set a “stop();” and define a setInterval to continue playing after 2 seconds. It worked. So ladies and gentlemen, this long winded and unavoidable post ends with the moral of “Trim off those extra frames and check your stops when exporting to a movie format”. Doesn’t have quite the rhyme as a fable of Aesop…I’ll have to work on that.
If anyone still runs into the problem even after running this check, post it up.
