Saving Animations

Hey Guys,

So i have a particle engine written in AS3.0 that works quite well. The thing is, I don’t really want to be taking up the CPU cycles to constantly render out and calculate lets say “fire” for example.

Is there any way I can run my particle engine swf and save the animation as a set of transparent .pngs?

Or am I looking at having to use a screen capture program like Camtasia to record my animation while it’s playing and then use post-production to clear the background?

Thanks!